A SHIELD Codex Halloween: The Ritual of Chud
by KhamanV
Summary: The harvest season always brings with it a sense of ritual to pave the way for the future. It's with this in mind that Doctor Strange and Loki left Wong with a single, gentle but unusual request: Throw a small Halloween party. Invite a handful of magical guests. Spend the evening telling tales and growing closer together. But why? (see AO3 version for more details)
1. Devil's Night

**A SHIELD Codex Halloween: The Ritual of Chud**

1\. Devil's Night

. . .

 _177A Bleecker Street. The evening of Oct 30_.

Outside the door of the old manor sat a cheap card table covered with that unmistakeable ugly green felt. On it, a plastic pumpkin spilled over with mini bags of M&Ms, a green plate with a happy ghost said _Boo_! and offered up its gifts of peanut butter cups, and a silver platter etched with indescribable runes that seemed to shift before the children's eyes was stacked high with a dented pyramid of neatly saran-wrapped rice krispie treats. Some had chocolate chips. A few had delicately swirled PB streaks on them. All were labelled safely for kids with allergies. Wong made them personally in the days before. The Sacred Plate of Satori-Fong, an iffily historied 'ancient' artifact that was actually probably made in the 40's by a con artist witch still holed up in Brooklyn today, did a pretty good job at keeping the marshmallow cool and cohesive, and it had the bonus of adding a little real flavor to tomorrow's holiday.

A sign pinned to the door read 'Happy Halloween!' and 'Please take tonight and celebrate tomorrow!' in Wong's neat script. Pushed to the edge of the table was a plastic crate of free, if colorful, toothbrushes, the sole concession he'd made to Stephen Strange, who had to be forced away from the idea of adding in little red and black boxes of dental floss that were embossed with the name of his regular dentist.

"Do you want us to get egged, Stephen?" Wong had shouted at him from across the manor three days prior, his hands sticky with cooking spray and marshmallow gibs, without a trace of humor. "Because that is _absolutely_ why we will have to explain to Kamar-Taj how we let the New York Sanctum get egged!"

Wong didn't like to fight, actually. But when he did, he went in to _win_.

The display would refill itself periodically, as the invisible magic eye monitored the card table situation. Wong had, on Stephen's recovering funds, bought _pallets_ of snacks, and ingredients to make enough marshmallow treats to choke a kid brought up on Popeye's biscuits. The table would stay up through the holiday, just as full as when he'd set it up. Because he'd had to raise his voice over it.

None of this conflict was in his voice as he opened the door with a big, broad smile. "Miss Maximoff!"

"Please. Wanda." Wanda's hands fidgeted together for a moment until one came up to pull a lock of red hair away from her face. Her already soft accent made her "Am I early?"

"You are precisely on time. The other two are already here. _They_ were too early." He gestured to the table. "Feel free. I've got plenty more inside."

Wanda gave him a small laugh, then snatched up a krispie with the quick flash of her hands, old street-brat moves, having no idea that her first choice of a treat immediately endeared her to him. "These look great, Wong."

"I made them myself," he said, no longer hiding his pride.

She beamed at him, holding the krispie in two hands and following him inside.

. . .

SHIELD Agent Aggie Harkness piled the cards in front of her and set them to shuffling with a snap of her fingers. They slapped against the old oak of the round table, dancing with satisfying verve along its glasslike finished surface, rustling a five-stack of marshmallow bats. She looked up at Wanda with a nod, her hair a little greyer than the last time Wanda saw her at a joint Avengers and SHIELD meeting. "Hey, Wanda. We were just playing solitaire until you arrived."

"Solitaire usually… means only one?" Wanda looked at the other woman at the table, assuming she'd misunderstood. The woman looked early thirtyish with an open, inquisitive face. Dark brown eyes that watched everything and seemed amused by it all. Tight braids going back along the scalp, beaded here and there with wood and what was either ivory or bone.

"Yeah, but Aggie is bad at the game and keeps cheating. I gotta keep these people honest." She got up, stretching a long, light brown hand across the table towards Wanda. Wanda could see the detail of one of her tattoo sleeves now, an intricate web of black and white symbols, many of which she barely recognized. Some seemed to be from the Goetia, which she did know a little about. "Pandora Peters. I'm the new girl."

"Oh! I _did_ read about you in a briefing report. Welcome to SHIELD." Wanda took Pandora's hand and found it warm but strong. "I'm Wanda Maximoff."

"I'm up on you." Pandora snapped a wink, then waved her to a seat next to her at the table. "Now we got a game."

"Poker night on the eve before Halloween?" Wanda took the seat, watching the glass that had been waiting for her to arrive fill with sparkling water.

"When I was a kid, we were right at the end of still calling it Devil's Night. Big city push to change that." Pandora took the cards away from Aggie and started shuffling them manually. "Guess I still call it the old way sometimes. Anyway, this is Wong's show, we're just here to have fun."

"A card game is fine for now," said Wong, taking his own place at the table. A set of candles followed him, adding a touch of goofily spooky ambience to the room. "The point is that we are gathered here tonight. Together."

Aggie shook her head. "Not that I understand why. I was told that we were going to help the guys with an important ritual. I'm not seeing how a card game with marshmallow bats as currency is going to do much."

Wong chuckled. "Don't worry about it. Our part is easy. Eat snacks, enjoy the company, tell tales, listen to kids outside take as many candies as they can stuff into their coats. Things like that."

Wanda peeled open the plastic wrap on the krispie treat and delicately tore a corner off. She offered it to the new lady, Pandora, with a gesture, who waved it off with a grin. "No thanks. I ate three of those things already." She jutted her thumb at the silver bowls of goodies around them.

"If anyone would like something else besides candy, I'll either summon it, or the kitchen is down the main hall there, take a right. Don't take the stairs up tonight, I'll have to come rescue you. The relics get antsy on nights like this one. Too much energy crackling in the night."

"Bathroom?" asked Pandora with the fearlessness of someone who knows full well everyone needs one sooner or later and wasn't going to be shamed about it.

"There's a small red door on the way to the kitchen."

"Relics?" asked Wanda. "I'm sorry, I've never been to any of the Sanctums."

"Relics," said Wong. "The Sanctums are a little like museums, Wanda, a dedicated, well-guarded protectorate of magic from around our world. With a bit less colonialism inherent to the system. A bit." He frowned, a delicate but emotionally rich look that suggested he had a few issues left with the program but didn't want to get into them right now. "The relics are of varying types and each Sanctum tends to specialize somewhat. Books, for example, tend to remain in Kamar-Taj itself, which has a very well updated library system including electrical climate controls. In addition, we've modernized its classification and sorting systems, using both computerized and ensorcelled techniques in tandem. It's not unusual to see both ancient chained codexes and an up to date computer on the same aisle."

The pride was clear in his lecturer's voice.

"Now, the New York Sanctum specializes in storing dimensional weave curios and certain other unique artifacts, some of which have demonstrated practical usage during their creation and recovery, and many of which have at least a pearl of unique self-awareness. The Doctor's cloak is one of these artifacts, and it goes to show the best case scenario regarding what can happen when the relics become unbound." Now he sounded almost chiding.

"If a relic has created its own identity, isn't it worth looking into what the… item itself wants?" Wanda's brow was furrowed.

"You mean rather like how we _must_ always acknowledge Vision's autonomy." Wong smiled.

Her brow smoothed, startled at how clearly her undertone had come through.

"It's absolutely something we consider within each artifact's context. They may not be dismissed as mere objects. The cloak, as an example, had been perfectly content to lie dormant for many, many years. However, such artifacts often come alive when the right person approaches it at the right time. My own feeling, which is particular to myself, is that the situation where the cloak and Strange bonded was unhelpfully chaotic. This is not what I think is preferable, as a guardian and as a, well, museum caretaker, so to speak. But it wasn't up to me. So yes, I sound displeased by their bond for reasons of that circumstance. But the cloak is apparently quite pleased with its choice, and _I'm_ not going to be the one to break up the band."

Pandora continued to cut the cards, then drafted out a basic opening hand to each person at the table. Aggie was leaning back. Her cards drifted up of their own volition for her to study, then they flitted down again. "Show-off," said Pandora.

"You'll get the hang of it."

"When I'm sixty." She felt Wanda's look. "My magical talents are pretty narrow. The boss monster likes to call it 'specialized.' I think it's just his once in a century way of being nice."

Aggie snorted. "She's an instinctive aether tracker and she's good with magical constructs. Runes, fetch bags, hell, she worked up a fully empowered athame within a couple of hours as one of her introduction tests and I watched Loki get this lemony pinched look on his face that means he was incredibly impressed but would rather die than show it."

"He gets that look _all_ the time." Pandora sounded dismissive.

"You've got something you're good at, and you built up your skills by yourself." Aggie leaned in towards Wanda. "She's also pretty good at blackmail, so keep an eye on your cards."

"Bitch," said Pandora, cheerfully.

"Now, now," said Wong, putting up a hand.

"It's okay, she's being affectionate. I like to tease her about how she got this job in the first place." Aggie rolled her eyes over to him. "Unlike how I got recruited, when I had to camp in a demon-infested forest for the better part of a week, courtesy of my old, undead evil-bonded family."

"You can just call them Republicans, Aggie, you don't have to toe around your whitebread heritage with me."

Aggie froze, but couldn't help but break out into laughter a second later. "I just mentally materialized in a world where a bunch of ancient demon women lined up to vote like a bunch of turn of the century suffragettes."

"Be about how it would go down, too." Pandora tapped at the stack of remaining cards, fussy about making sure they were even with each other.

"How _were_ you recruited, Miss Peters?" Wanda looked at her cards. Crappy hand. She put two down to be re-dealt.

"Girl, no. Pandora only. I don't do titles. I won't even call the boss monster 'Mr.'"

"You called him Your Highness once." Aggie looked at her cards again, then pushed a single marshmallow bat into the center of the table. Wong did the same.

"Just to see if he'd shit. And he did."

Aggie smiled as Wanda folded her cards and set them down away from her, tapping out of this round. Two marshmallow bats were hers, this hand. "That's on principle. He likes it when people are fearless enough to have a go at him, Pan. You know that's the _other_ half of how you got the job." She jutted her chin at Wanda. "It's a good story, but it doesn't fit in a two sentence synopsis."

"Perfect," said Wong, breaking in. "Why don't you tell the tale, Aggie? Get our evening started off right."

"Oh, you going down a bat on the first hand doesn't count?" Aggie picked up one of her wins, nearly ate it, then looked at it, put it back down, and swiveled around to pick through a giant silver bowl of candy instead. She came up with a tiny box of dark chocolate nonpareils. "So. Scary stories in the dark, and a high-stakes poker game."

"Sure," said Wong, agreeably.

Aggie shrugged. "I don't know what kind of ritual this all is, but all right. Buckle in, folks, cluster in, and listen to my story. Me, Pandora, and the cat eating menace of the lower city."

"The _what_?" Wanda reared back in her seat, horrified. "Oh no. I love cats."

"So did this guy, in a manner of speaking. It has a happy ending, I promise." Aggie winked at her. "But I understand. That's why I took on the case in the first place…"


	2. Castlevania

2\. Castlevania

. . .

Pixie was a brindled old mix of copper and brown, a spitfire cat that had a long life behind her, despite the fact that she'd never met a fight she backed down from. The victory notches on her jingly bell collar - that her family had known of - included two German Shepherds, one high-strung rottie mix, a parrot with a potty mouth on it that had flown up onto the apartment complex roof and required a six hour 'R for language' rated fireman drama to get back down, incalculable mice, dozens of city rats, cockroaches that honestly didn't count except for the one dismembered one that had been landed in Dad's slipper for breakfast, a mailman that switched patrols after what she did to his leg, and her own tomcat mate from the alley down the way, who had given her four kittens and paid for his sole night of privilege with half an ear.

Pixie always made it home after her wars, even creaky and old, curling up around her eldest daughter and giving her a hearty wash. The other kittens all lived in nearby homes and meowed at her from the windows when she stalked by. Her legacy was secure. So when, at last, she did not come home one night, the family worried, and the family grieved, but the family, really, had been ready to face this great warrior's departure from their world.

Except for Lil. Lily Tiger, to be exact, but only Grandma called her that now and got away with it. Lil was twelve, and like Pixie, who she had loved above all else in the world, not prone to taking shit from anyone, ever, full stop. Lil had canvassed the street in search of her lost Pixie. She took detailed notes in a spiral notebook she got for a dollar she cadged out of her ma saying it was for candy, which had made more sense to the tired hairdresser than detective work. Lil had put up signs. Lil had found clues that she didn't like - bigger boys three blocks away telling each other awful stories about dead pets, younger kids saying things about the boogeyman, and her blockbuster bit of intel, the nosy old man that had shut the door on her once, but then, after she brought him candy and yelled through his door about her lost cat, told her about the shape he'd seen in the night more than once. Carrying something squirming in a bag.

Lil went home with her information and sat with it for a long time. Her brother came in, asked her what she thought she was gonna do with all that nothing. She smacked him, not at all hard, but loud, upside his fade. "I'm gonna call SHIELD, you ass," she told him, matter of factly.

Her brother had laughed, and laughed, and slammed her bedroom door on his way out. SHIELD wasn't regarded as much better than normal cops. Not around here, anyway, where cynicism was a common currency.

"And that all is why I called you anyway. Nobody in the house thought anyone would come. That I'm wasting y'alls time." Lil said to SHIELD Agent Agatha Harkness, her brown arms crossed in front of her lime green and yellow tank top, her voice strong and fearless. "But I think I have something here."

Aggie looked down at her with a mild, practiced expression and said, "I think you do, too, Lil." She looked around and dropped onto the stoop next to the kid, deciding that full agent airs wasn't going to do her any good, and, for a moment, vaguely wishing she hadn't volunteered. Loki was good with kids, not her. But Lil was pretty self-possessed, she had to admit. Young, but smart as hell. Made it easier on her. She could talk to the kid like an adult. "We've had something on the radar around here for a while, but nothing we could chase. Just the reports of vanishing pets. Over and over. Dozens of stories over the last few months, from here up to the water."

"Like over in London."

"Croydon, but yes. They say now it's been a fox taking all the cats." Aggie didn't bother to hide the doubt in her voice. The tone of the reports had been a little… off. The lack of trail or useful witnesses. It had been eventually kicked to the new department Loki nominally ran, which oversaw supernatural or magical encounters. Still nothing.

"Ain't the same killer, then." Lil tapped her notepad against her leg. Photocopies of her notes were already folded up in Aggie's pocket. This girl was prepared. "But maybe something similar about it all anyway."

"Maybe." Aggie draped her wrists on her knees, thinking. "Anyone else local following this? Neighborhood paper, something?" She frowned, realizing that sounded like SHIELD didn't have local resources. She also knew she was being oversensitive about this. "I did a check on the city paper, ran databases, but most of what we've got around here is online. You'd know better what's on the street here."

"Nah. All's we got is the church newsletter, and I ain't even go to that church." Lil shrugged. "There's an office couple blocks over, part of Ill Magazine. Covers the scene around here, some of the bros get to go play on the main stage and cover the big news stories, you know 'em."

Aggie did. Ill was getting decent play as an indie reporter's platform, with a heavy hip-hop focus and a lot of coverage of global politics. They seemed to give a serious shit, which was nice. Their work had already started to get pulled into the SHIELD databases for reference, and they'd been in her scrape before driving down. "They're good, but I didn't find anything useful on their site yet." She thought again. "Might be worth talking to someone on their local beat, though."

"I would. Only reason I didn't is they make a big deal about no kids on their turf." Lil rolled her eyes, clearly offended by their shortsightedness.

Aggie couldn't help a laugh. "I would have made an exception for you." She patted the pocket with the notes in it. "I got your number, and I'll keep you updated on what I find."

"You don't gotta do that." Lil looked away. "Most stories around here don't get an ending."

"Lil, I love exactly two things on this planet. My job, and my cat. If my Sabrina went missing and I was hearing tales about some sicko running around with a bag…" Aggie trailed off for a moment, forgetting she was talking to a kid. What she was saying was absolute truth. So was the unsaid part. "Yeah, I'd probably not be a very good agent if I finished that sentence."

"I got you, though." Lil was looking at her with grudging acceptance. "All right. Thanks for coming down, and for actually listening to me."

Aggie smiled, a lopsided but less-awkward thing than it was when she showed up. "Thanks for calling."

. . .

Aggie finished her etheric sweep of the alleyway, her hand only mildly glowing now - she was still working on making her basic magical 'vocabulary,' so to speak, invisible the way Loki could - and frowned, disappointed. She shoved her hand into the pocket of her black SHIELD-issue undercover jacket, which was only slightly less blatantly obvious than a navy windbreaker with a logo on the back, and scuffled her shoe at a stray bit of broken brick. Ill had been a bust. They were nice in there, but when she'd flashed the badge and given the skinny on what she was here for, there was a long, cool pause, a gentle chivvy towards the door, and a request for a business card, which she could give since technically this was a front-facing operation. So, the next step was old-school street work. With a magical twist.

"Okay," she muttered to herself. "Three alleys, three similar wafts of something coming through here, and no trail."

That something was more like a glimmer. An echo of some encounter that spilled blood. Could be a pet getting hurt. Could be a mugging that went a little bit wrong. Could be someone getting a papercut off a Wendy's bag. All of it was faded by time and weather, or yes, even competing magic. Hard to tell. But it definitely tied back to blood.

She considered calling back to base and getting the man himself on the line, see if he had any advice. But it was also just as likely that Loki would listen to her lay it out, stay quiet for a painful five minutes, and then tell her to do that again in her head until she came up with another angle on her own, and she could do that all by herself with a way less sarcastic undertone. So she did, looking at what she had and what she could extrapolate, and still came up with bupkis.

"Fuck," she said to herself, looking around to be sure no one overheard. She let herself be annoyed with Loki for a moment, knowing full well that if it the situation was actually actively dangerous, he'd show up. Then she decided to get some food and think it through again.

. . .

The gyro place had tables outside, and Aggie liked the cooling fall air enough to be comfortable in it. She poked a wandering slice of tomato back onto its pita nest and glanced up when a shadow passed over her. She took a bite, then paused mid-chew when the person sat down in the other chair, unwrapping a piece of baklava. There were plenty of empty tables.

She continued eating, looking at her new dining companion, who was now baldly watching her eat. Light brown complexion, dark eyes, a puffy head of gingery-dark waves that hadn't been braided in a bit. There were tattoos peeking out from the wrist of a leather jacket. Aggie couldn't make them out. She knew what the lady was seeing, a greying white woman who looked more like a history prof than any sort of federal agent.

"You're Harkness, from SHIELD," said the woman, without any lead-up. She ate a corner of the baklava triangle. "I'm Pandora Peters."

Aggie kept eating her pita. SHIELD protocol was what it was, but she agreed with Loki's advice to anyone he taught these days, grudging all the while - don't confirm or deny shit until you had to. Make others give up information while fighting to get at yours.

"I work at Ill."

Aggie arched her eyebrow and stabbed a piece of chicken that fell out of her gyro with a plastic fork.

Pandora pulled out the business card Aggie left. "They didn't have anything for you, agent. I do."

Sometimes Loki had great advice. "They've got good food here."

Pandora looked at the front of the gyro joint. "You investigated your way to the best sammy joint in little Greektown."

"Cool," she said, the heart of neutrality. "What do you have?"

Pandora leaned back, as if she'd seen an entrypoint. "I have a trade."

Munch, munch. Really was a damn good pita. She locked eyes with Pandora. Power-move, lady. Watch me eat. She resisted the urge to be a child and start smacking with her mouth open. She got cranky when people rolled up on her without checking in. Especially while eating.

Pandora sat there, watching her right back. Okay, fair.

Aggie swallowed, thinking. "How'd you get the card? You weren't there when I was."

"Stole it off my editor's desk."

Aggie smiled.

Pandora finished her piece of baklava, balling up the wrap. "So here's what I got on offer. I can give you the leads I have on the pet killings, which are not the same things Lil got. She's a great kid. My editor shouldn't have blown her off. And I have a few other things. Useful things."

The pita was done. Aggie waited.

"In exchange, you get me an interview with the big guy."

Aggie arched an eyebrow. "The big guy."

Pandora leaned towards her. "Him. The big mystery. Your boss, who should still be in a prison on wherever the shit in the galaxy, who attacked New York, who now somehow works for SHIELD. Loki. The trickster himself."

Aggie started to laugh.

"Nothing about this is funny, Agent Harkness." Pandora sounded peeved. She probably was. This could be a big scoop for a hungry reporter.

She settled down. "I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you. I'm not socialized all that well, so when I'm surprised, I laugh. It's a nervous laugh. It also sounds like a bitch laugh." Aggie leaned forward, conspiratorial. "If I really worked for someone like that, I'd spend the next ten minutes rolling this conversation around in a circle until everyone's tired and pissed off."

"You do work for him."

"Miss Peters-"

"Call me Pandora." It didn't sound that friendly.

"Pandora. Look. SHIELD investigates a lot of weird shit, sure. You're rolling up and trying to play off that in that weird shit organization, I work for an, and excuse me here, outlaw space wizard." Aggie grinned. "You think that means I'm a space wizard, too?"

"I'm betting you're skilled in the art, yeah." Before Aggie could start shaking her head, Pandora rolled up her sleeves, showing the tattoos. Pandora said a single word, soft and lilting. They began to glow, light licking from underneath the jacket and trailing down the ivy that bound several protective marks inspired by the Goetia together. A shield of her own, and a non-hostile calling card between two magicians.

All the laughter in her faded. All right, Aggie. We have a situation. She licked her lips, thinking again. The second plan. "Counter-offer."

"I'm all ears."

"You give me the information that you have. And then, after this situation is resolved, I'll, if they're in a good mood, talk to someone who may or may not laugh both of us to the moon. I will make you no guarantees. You're on the hook, and maybe I just ghost on you. But I don't think you've got a choice but to take it."

Pandora went still. "How the fuck do you figure that?"

Aggie gestured at her business card. "Because you're confident, and you made a damn good play that should work on most people, but I saw you're not merciless. If you were, you would already have your editor in your corner no matter what, and you wouldn't have had to steal my card to shimmy onto your shingle here. But you've got a nose for the story, so you took the chance. And also, you're going to give me what you have, because when it comes down to it, you also remember that little girl's name, and you want her to know what happened to her cat."

"Bitch," said Pandora, almost breathing it. It was a reflex statement, not angry. Almost impressed.

"I'm not very good with people, Pandora. I think they're easy to read, usually, and what I read is usually not that great. I liked Lil. I already like you." She did, despite the unannounced arrival. The tats got her attention fast. It wasn't common to find people like yourself. "Got any pets?"

"Dog."

"You like them?"

"She. She's a mutt." Truculent now. "Stole her from a dogfighting ring after one of our stories helped the cops break it up. She's a sweetheart. They were going to use her as a bait dog. I love her to pieces."

"And you've held her at night, wondering what would happen if whoever this is took her, how you'd feel, how you'd look for her, wondering what you could do with what magic you have, to stop them. Can you do it alone?" Aggie kept watching her, looking for the little tweaks in the face, the microexpressions that told her the story. "It's no. Whatever you know, you know it makes this a no. So now there's two of us, Pandora. That changes the odds. If you give me what you've got."

"You going to ghost me?"

"You want to do this for your dog and for Lil's cat?"

"That, and what if this fucker goes after a kid next?" Sour, dour, and pissed off.

"Then I'm not going to ghost you. First lesson I picked up - don't work alone if you don't have to. I came out to investigate, then ops rules say I call for backup to clear it. I have you? We skip a couple steps and end this before it gets worse. I can make a call like that." Aggie looked around. They were still alone. "Loki does what he wants. I can't make a promise to you. But I'll talk to him. If this ends in a good way, I'll stay in your corner, even if your editor won't. It's a thing with us. We like taking chances."

"You're lying when you say you're not good at people." Admiration was creeping into Pandora's voice.

"I'm fucking terrible with people, Pandora. I'm too old, too honest, and I'm pissy all the time." Aggie pushed her gyro basket to the side and clasped her hands together atop the table. "So let's talk for real. What do you have?"

. . .

"What I had was a couple of other iffy witness statements stitched together into something that, with a little legwork and some local favors pulled in, pointed at a local dude, of whom there were no few interesting shitty rumors already, a location radius all this shit gave me, and one more important thing." Pandora flexed her arms, the points of her elbows digging into the table in a way less than comfortable. She was watching Wanda while Aggie told most of the story, looking at the woman's young and fretful face. Whole house of pet lovers here. Aggie had been skipping some of the details. Pandora had a good guess she was going to read the room and also skip the worst ones - the sounds. Sounds in the night, nothing pleasant or happy. Animals in distress. Pandora hated that sound. She'd fought people over it. Not since joining SHIELD, though. Aggie had told the truth. They had her back.

"We spent the next couple of nights doing recon and running down what she had. Making sure this was the right trail. Pan held onto one 'important' thing till close to the end, a detail that capped off that we were following the right guy. She still didn't trust me. Pretty understandable."

"SHIELD's reputation still isn't all that great, and you have that boss…"

Aggie laughed. "Spoiler here, she still hasn't gotten that interview."

"What's the last detail?"

Aggie looked at Wong, just as invested in the story as Wanda. Then she looked at Pandora.

Pan grinned. "I got the asshole's skinhead forum name."

. . .

Aggie froze in recognition when Pandora said the name. A log-in to several connected neo-Nazi sites that a call back to base would no doubt verify IP and matching behavior to one individual.

Morbius.

She came back to the now, shaking her head. "Hell no, no way it's him."

"That's the name I got. Guy behind it is a real shit. He doesn't come over this way too often, he knows the street knows his face and is more than happy to rearrange it again for him. But he also hasn't been by for a good while." Pan leaned back on the hotel couch. "Coinciding with when pets started to go missing."

"Then he stole the nick or it's a reference or…" Aggie frowned and paused, not because she was unused to this level of high weirdness in her life, because she very much was, but because there would be a whole other can of worms to be found down here. "Or he's using the name of his sire, which would still be an incredibly weird situation."

"His sire?" Pan looked blank. Then didn't, her face scrunching. "You mean he's a fucking vampire."

"A fucking Nazi vampire."

"Correction noted. Okay, so who's Morbius and why do you know the name?"

Aggie closed the lid of the laptop. She could send off the request for an IP trace in a little bit, no harm. "Some of what I could say is compartmented, but what I can tell you is that we have a few contractors or associates to our wing of SHIELD who file useful information with us. One of these guys, a sorcerer, sent us a lot of documentation on a handful of supernatural or semi-supernatural individuals that his people keep an eye on. Morbius is one of these. We keep an eye on him, too, now. He's classified as 'non-hostile' because he's not usually active and he doesn't stir up shit when he is. I don't know where he's currently supposed to be, that's above my paygrade. But I cantell you he's not living in the discount basement of a five floor walk-up drinking pets like they're wine-in-a-box."

Pandora tugged a corner of her mouth over for her teeth to work on. "But this dude is still a vamp."

"A bad or chickenshit one, but yeah."

"What's the SHIELD protocol on handling vamps?"

"Don't know, actually. But I personally have a family protocol." Pandora looked at her, and Aggie grinned. "Long story. And I mean a verylong story. But in any case, small time vamps with hostile inclinations like this guy? Removal."

"Ah, the ol' Van Helsing maneuver."

"Van Helsing was a smart guy. Morbius is a big name in his ocean, he's stabilized and doesn't fuck around. It'd make a bigger mess to go after him than to leave him alone. The little ones? They get snacky, they make Dahmer look like a wimp. One took out hundreds during the fall of Carthage, nobody realized until decades later. Another, Constantinople. The plague years. Even now. They smell war or other conflict, move in, and feed so much they look like bloated ticks."

"Nazi vampires."

"Oh, they were there, too. They did lovely in Poland, from a shit point of view. So did the vampire hunters. Most of them retired after thathaul."

Pandora was watching her with a mix of confusion and respect. "This all still family protocol, Agent Harkness? The fuck kinda family you have?"

"An old and screwed up one. But my mom has a nice garden patch down in Florida these days. She's almost 110. Tomatoes, basil, several kinds of squash, and about six different herbs that don't grow anywhere else anymore that can really fuck someone up."

"All of you are witches." Pandora raised an eyebrow, taking all this in with surprising ease. "Okay. So we're going after this Baby Morbie?"

"I want to run his info back through base, make sure we've got the right guy. Then I'm going to file the general battle plan with the boss to get an okay. He's… pragmatic. Overall, SHIELD protocol prefers rehab or containment. We're deferred to on things like this, though, and Loki doesn't like leaving enemies around to stab us in the back. It's not always nice, but it's sometimes the right approach. Sometimes."

"I want in, the rest of the way. Make sure this goes neat." Pandora jutted her chin at Aggie. "I'll even make a special stake for it."

"Steak?" Aggie thought she misheard.

"Stake." Pandora stood up and headed for the door, flashing her arm tats on the way. "I'm good at making and marking ritual stuff. Ask me sometime how I got through college."

. . .

The all-clear came in ten minutes after the desk warriors confirmed their guy's IP presence and, for a bonus, ran a full search on his identity. Army wash-out with a dishonorable on his record. Set of priors, including a note about expunged juvie jaunts. The IP not only hung out at the big league skinhead sites, but also a few other troubling internet hangouts. Spence Stirling, which seemed to Aggie a bit too on the nose with the initials. 32, unmarried, vociferously angry about it, and with a terribly charming Instagram presence that hit all the usual barely coded white supremacist notes.

The desk warriors also found his Liveleak account. She and Pandora watched one video on the account, a recent one, and decided that was some pretty damn fine proof that not only was this their guy, but that he was quite the piece of shit, indeed. It also left Aggie with the troubling belief that Stirling was, in fact, going to escalate soon, and that he had revenge on the locals in mind. Loki was already on board with running interference for them, although he hadn't responded to anything in Aggie's notes about Pandora. Not surprising.

The basement apartment was a half mile outside the confirmed radius of animal attacks. He was too lazy, or too paranoid about sunlight, to wander far from his lair. So now Aggie and Pandora were finishing up their patrols around the building, the sun going a rich, hazy orange as it lowered in the sky. Operation time was before it began to touch the horizon. A groggy vampire could be properly identified for his crimes and intent - or, distant chance, redeem himself - but a groggy vampire was also easier to handle.

Aggie had a wealth of family history to look at for advice when it came to the supernatural. Her direct, demonic ancestor was her ancestor because she'd run afoul of both a servant of Vishanti and a demon hunter by the name of Hellstrom. And the general rule was, the moment things looked bad, you struck out. For the sake of life itself, if not your own.

Pandora had passed her the stake she'd spent the morning in private to make. Aggie could feel the energy wicking across its smoothed wooden surface, green and alive and so strong it felt almost sentient. A jaeger-stake, a hunter. She still knew little about Pan herself, but the woman was a no-shit artificer. Now it waited inside the pocket of her long jacket, as Aggie self-consciously realized she did look a little like a gender-swapped Van Helsing.

"Your job like this all the time?" asked Pandora as they approached the door.

"Usually I'm down in analytics riding a desk." Aggie pushed the door open, looking at the dark, brick-lined stairwell down to the lone basement 'apartment.' "Life's gotten spicier lately."

"Full moon? Halloween coming?"

"I just feel like the entire universe decided to roll it up a few notches on me again. You know how it is."

She could hear Pandora pause behind her, considering. "Yeah. Y'know, I do."

. . .

The two women kicked in the door and, anti-climactically, a half-awake vampire fell off a couch facing a scratched up wall with flaking paint, scrabbled across the floor, and then halfway up that wall. Why the wall was scratched up became immediately apparent, as ambient light caught the scarred, clawing hands as they dug into the brick underneath a layer of cheap plaster and particleboard.

The vampire, Spence Stirling himself, screamed at them in a yowling, half-animalistic voice that seemed to echo with rage. "What the fuck?"

"This was not in the Coppola movie," said Pandora behind her, sounding unimpressed.

"Gary Oldman could get it back in the day." Aggie's dominant hand was on the stake.

"Keanu still could. Did you know Gary's a piece of shit?"

"I heard. Least we still got Hopkins."

Stirling wasn't interested in classic horror cinema. "The fuck are you, and the fuck do you want?"

Aggie pulled out her badge, wondering if this almost hilarious absurdity was how her boss felt all the time. "Hi, I'm an agent with SHIELD, and we're looking into animal disappearances in this area. I'd like to ask you a few questions."

The response was not entirely coherent, and what was, was deeply impolite. There was a closed door on the far side of the room. Beyond it, Aggie heard noises, as if something there, too, had a few opinions on the apartment's resident. "Can you verify that you are a Mr. Spence Stirling, of Vanco-"

More hostile yowling. Some of it was aimed past Aggie at Pandora in a way that, she decided, cut short the attempt at doing this according to protocol. "You want the stake back, Pan?"

"You give it back to me now and instinct is gonna come in and make me aim at the balls, and that might be satisfying, but not a real good plan long-term." Spence said something else horrible. The answering yowls on the other side of the door got louder. Aggie paused, the stake just beginning to peek out of her pocket. "You're stockpiling."

"The fuck I am. There's some sort of bitch-ass old cat in there. I got it into a bag, but once I put it away for later, it went berserk on my ass." This useful bit of information dissolved back into brief sermons on both of their parentages.

"Pixie," said Pandora, the wonder clear in her voice. Spence snarled. This time, Aggie saw the marks of cat-claws all over his shoulder. Good kitty, she thought. She moved towards him, the stake all the way out now. "Why Morbius?"

"He's a pussy," snarled Spence, beginning to move and move fast. "Even the pale king that made me said so. Someone should be a real vampire. Clean up all the bad blood. Drink it up, clear the streets, remake the wor-"

Aggie struck out, catching Spence as he lunged towards her. Instead of being coated with gore and grime as the stake plunged into his heart, he began to suck inward, dessicating away into dust within seconds. The stake disintegrated, too, its work done.

"Honestly," she said. "The paperwork is going to take longer than this did."

The yowls began to carry through the air, a prisoner sensing release was imminent. Aggie glanced at Pandora to make sure she was okay, then went to the bedroom door and knelt next to it, making the same kissy noises she did to Sabrina. Then she reached out with a little animal empathy - a skill she didn't really know she had until she starting training at SHIELD. Just a sense of giving, that the cat was safe now, that she would go home to be warm and with people that loved her.

The yowls eased into a low, grudging growl. Aggie pushed the door open, and was face to face with a fully fluffed Pixie, copper and brown and with clumps of fur strewn around a trashed bedroom she'd done her part in fucking up. "Aren't you just a queen," said Aggie to the cat, admiringly. "You want to go home to your mama girl?"

"RrRRooowww…" said Pixie, putting a paw down as she got a proper sniff off Aggie.

"Straight to Lil, I promise."

"Mmmrrrrrr….."

Pandora was laughing her ass off behind Aggie. "Okay, yeah, you're better with animals than people."

"Well, you just watched me stab a guy."

"He had it coming. The fuck did he call us?" Pandora shifted. Aggie glanced back, saw her looking around. "Who's the pale king?"

Good question. One that would probably engender more paperwork than the op itself. "…I don't know."

. . .

"Watching Aggie carry six pounds worth of tightly-wound, clawed grenade down the darkening street was pretty much the capper on all that. It's a hell of a day when you stab up a vampire and then rescue a cat in the same five minutes."

"I'm just glad Pixie was alive. It's a shame I couldn't get a lot of closure on the other pets Stirling drank. Seems like they would fade the same way he did. That's a particular vampiric subtype." Aggie shook her head. "But anyway, I got the paperwork sent in over another gyro that night, and the next morning, Loki showed up and gave Pandora a job."

Pandora shrugged, folding her hand and eating a few cheese crackers out of a crinkling bag. She swallowed before she talked again. "Wasn't that easy. Had a talk over it. I'm still pissed I didn't get what I wanted."

"But did you at least get something better?" Wanda looked at her, curious.

"Sure is something different. And in a world that gets me angry a lot of the time, I guess it's a start." Pandora leaned back in her chair. "Aggie, I got a question."

"Hmm."

"You do a charm on that cat to make her live longer?"

"Pixie?"

"That cat had to be, like, thirty."

Aggie laughed. "She wasn't that old. But some cats are just that kind of stubborn. Wouldn't be surprised if she sticks around a while."

"That's not an answer." Pandora crinkled her nose. "You're getting to be as bad as he is."

. . .

Pandora didn't relax her pose as her brain raced through the details of the job offer. Her eyes stayed fixed on Loki, who reclined in the borrowed chair with the same ease as a cat by a hot stove. "I don't like it."

"Good. You shouldn't. You should be uncomfortable enough to fight, when you think the fight's necessary." Loki barely looked awake, honestly. A pale hand flexed now and again on the arm of the chair.

"I don't get why you want a PR and journalism wonk on your team anyway, if most of the time you're going to want the story killed. I know how SHIELD operates. We never get the full details out here."

"But should you? All of it? None of it? What parts of it?" The eyes were closed. "I could play scenarios with you. The serial killer with crucially important MO details. The environmental threat. The debts, the details, the dirty bits of the job. You know why journalists have the ethics they do. And a good story will always come out, eventually. Converse to your assumption, I think that's important. But how? That's trickier. I don't agree with basic SHIELD protocol on everything, Miss Peters. I think we hide a little too much sometimes. But we are also in a position of perspective that dims us to what the world needs. And yes, I do believe that sometimes a story has to hide for a while - what you consider killed - and sometimes what feels like too many details are buried. With you, we can widen the perspective, and be sure that enough of a story comes out in a way that's more helpful than if we make our own assumptions."

"That's overly complicated."

"Put it another way. I will have your back in the way your current editor doesn't. If I ask you to slow a piece of news before it breaks mainstream, and you're not satisfied with the reasons you're given, you are to argue it with at least the same mistrust and heat you're staring at me with right now. I'm a bastard, ask anyone, but I'll always consider a good argument. What I'm offering to you is journalism with a twist - make an actual difference in how an organization treats the truth."

"Any sort of change like that is a long-term play." Pandora leaned forward, looking at him. "I get that you're in a position to do long-term, but maybe I'm not."

"No, maybe not. But some of the changes may come sooner. I don't know, I'm not a prognosticator. But I have decent hunches."

There was something loaded in that statement that Pandora couldn't dig at. She didn't know enough.

"In exchange, you'll have an environment in which you can develop your skills without the worry that some nice religious person tries to burn down your house. Ms. Harkness tells me you're a good artificer, and you seem to understand the sigils you wear. I'm sure there's quite a story in that, too. I might even like to hear it, sometime."

"Even when you're almost trying to be nice, you sound like an asshole."

Loki seemed to wake up a little, grinning that wide and white-toothed smile she'd seen on rare news footage. "How good of you to notice. Do you need time to consider?"

"No." It came out short, and mistrusting, and loaded with growing curiosity. "I'm in."

"There's a lot of hiring paperwork. It's awful." Loki seemed to doze off again. A stack of paper appeared on the sidetable next to her. A pen topped off the stack, then another to match. "The ink always seems to run out about two thirds of the way through. Talbot is being cheap on office supplies again."

"Who's Talbot?" asked Pandora, reaching for the pen.

"Someone worse than me. A bureaucrat in a uniform." The sharp face came alive to sneer at nothing. "Welcome to SHIELD, Miss Peters. The future will get more interesting for you from here. That is a safe promise."

-end chapter-

 **Note:**

The Codex Halloweenie is running slower this year, and I apologize for that. It's been a rough month, and I've lost a lot of time I'd use for writing. This week, where I meant to do some crunch catch-up and hopefully at least get your updates to the third or fourth chap by the end week and near done on my end, didn't work out at all for me.

You see, I live in Pittsburgh. I'm not going to get into this a lot right now, because it's Halloween and I want everyone to have a great time. But if you're a follower, then you know I take a lot of what goes on in the world to heart, and sometimes you'll find pieces of it in the stories I write. This current heartbreak isn't just about what goes on in the world for me, this one is close enough to touch. But we're gonna keep telling stories. It's going to be okay.

All themes in this year's fic were chosen before beginning. That a Nazi vampire features in this chapter is a dark coincidence. That it's tied, distantly, to Morbius, who has just been announced to get a movie coming up, is another one of those 'YOU'RE F*ING KIDDING ME' moments.

Do your best out there. And as always, thank you so much for reading.


	3. Fallen

3\. Fallen

. . .

Wanda smiled at Pandora as Aggie got up to go find the room with the red door. "I'm glad to hear the tale of the cat and the cat-eater had a happy ending, after all." Then she looked to her left, at Wong, who had just taken the lead via a hot streak in their low-stakes poker game. "You know, Wong, you wear robes like a monk, but you host the game for us tonight. Is there nothing in your traditions about the evils of gambling?"

"We at Kamar-Taj are taught to understand that the world around us is full of impurity, and we are to strive to keep our minds and our bodies clear despite this, so that we may be better vessels for our magic," said Wong, solemnly. His hands were gently scooping a pile of marshmallow bats towards him.

"Then what's all this?" she teased.

"I am protecting the rest of you from these vile temptations," said Wong, just as solemnly. Then he ate one of his sugary winnings, tipping Wanda a wink.

She laughed as Aggie returned to the table. "All right, all right. May I ask another question? This one is a little more important."

"Of course." Wong gestured, his fingers snapping in a ritualized way. Copper goblets appearing at the table filled themselves with mulled, warm cider, fresh from the pots in the kitchen. The smells of nutmeg and cinnamon filled the air, making the cold fall outside seem both distant and pleasant.

"Why am _I_ here? I'm not really a witch or a sorcerer, like any of you. People call me one, and what I do looks a bit like the magic you have, but I'm not…" Wanda trailed off. "I'm not trained like any of you. I don't know runes or spells."

Aggie watched Wong fold the cards. His eyes caught her, and she read the suggestion there. She took it, reluctant but willing to try. She turned to Wanda after thinking a moment. "There's lots of different kinds of magic, and I don't think anyone here at the table knows them all, Wanda. What you have is… well, I think it's a bit like some of the mind-magics I've read about, and you were given it from a source that's so beyond basic magic - infinitely so - that we really don't have a term for what you can do _besides_ acknowledging it as magic. It's something new, sure, but it still has certain similar rules we can identify. We can work with that. The patterns are the same."

Wanda sat with her hands clasped together, trying to absorb that. "Vision suggested I keep trying to work on meditation, learn to focus myself. Like you do."

"It's a good idea. Grounding and centering is the core of the basic courses we get over in SHIELD's weird little wonderland. What you have is unusual, but it still seems to operate by certain common rules. I'm sure you'd be welcome to come over and practice with us."

"And in Kamar-Taj," added Wong.

"WAND." Wanda laughed, thinking about Loki's little but growing version of the fictional X-Files department. The Wizardry, Alchemy, and Necromancy Department, a monster of a name cobbled together by Phil Coulson himself. "Goodness, but that's a terrible acronym. And thank you, Wong. And all of you."

"It's awful. Everyone hates it, but no one as much or as visibly as Loki. Therefore, it's _never_ getting off the internal stationary." Aggie looked at her freshly dealt hand, then put it back down. "Ugh."

"I think that's a tell," said Wong.

"I think it's a total loss. Take my marshmallows." Aggie turned her attention to her cider. "I'll suffer with my consolation prize. Which is delicious."

Pandora upped her bet, then took a new card. Her face was professionally blank, until she looked up and rejoined the conversation. "So, no weird witchy stuff in your early life, Wanda?"

Wanda looked at her cards and thought about the question, appreciating that the question was politely direct while _also_ tactfully not getting into the events of her life shortly before Ultron and the Sokovian disaster. No wonder Pandora had been a journalist previous to SHIELD. "I mean, not unusually so?" She frowned, still thinking. "Sokovia is - was - is… in an interesting place. Liminal, maybe? I don't know the word very well, but Vision used it in a way that made sense to me. The city all of you saw on the news, yes, so much is modern now. Especially rebuilding. Like Krakow, or Sarajevo. There's the city, it's part of the new world, and yet there's… pieces of the old all around it."

"So no weird stuff to you, but I admit, I don't know a lot about Sokovia. Could just tell us about the city, the way you grew up in it, Wanda. It doesn't _have_ to be horror stories all night." Pandora folded her hand. Wong was going to win this round, too. She snuck a look at him, suspicious, while he looked back with pure innocence.

Wanda laughed. "There's still not so much to tell. Sokovia went relatively untouched by the world wars themselves, but what happened to the rest of the countries around us over the decades, I mean, it changed us, too, we became more cautious. The Bosnian conflict became our conflict, too, and you know how I feel about war today. But it wasn't so bad, living there, growing up there. Sokovia has its churches, like you see, but also its small temples and synagogues and little neighborhoods all around them." She smiled at the memory of its skyline. "I saw both of these worlds, when I was little, and skirted around them while my brother and I lived as best we could. My mother, she was Catholic, so she would take us to the churches, but my father was Jewish, and supposedly so was our real father - me and Pietro's."

Aggie paused, her cards resting face down on the table. "I didn't know you were adopted."

She shrugged it away. "It's not important to me, honestly. My mother and father were with us until they, well, weren't, and they were our true family. I lost them so young that this is simply how it will always be to me. They were my heart.

"In Sokovia I always thought as a child that the two faiths lived mostly side by side. Mostly. Jewish families, for a long time, were kept to the rural edges of the city and it seemed to be, well, just how it was that they saw more poverty than others. You don't realize until you think about it and _really_ look that it was about something else. Jewish people came to live in Sokovia, away from Hitler, and they survived what he did, but it… I suppose it wasn't always kind, either." Wanda's expression turned rueful. "We did okay, our family, and that's because most people knew my mother better, and she was seen taking us to church. But my father, he taught me Hebrew, too, and he planted trees for our birthdays, and he told us scary tales of the _dybbuk_ and the _alukah_ to be sure we didn't sneak out at night."

"Alukah?"

"A kind of vampire." Wong supplied the answer, quiet. In his voice was a tone that suggested that he had a few books on the topic if they'd like to read them.

"No shit," said Pandora to Wanda.

"No shit," said Wanda, smiling. She didn't realize that the longer she talked about her home, the softer her voice and the stronger her accent became. "So I carry both faiths with me. I admire the cross, because it protected my family for so long. I appreciate what it means. But inside, I keep close all my father's stories and the way he taught us to enjoy a good day of rest, and so many small, sensible things. And I have the sorrow that he felt he had to hide much of this to give us a chance at more privileges. I think that's when I knew when I'd grown up. When I understood why he felt it was safer, sometimes, to be quiet about who he was." She looked up, suddenly remembering. "That's true, I remember the _lilith_."

"What, the demon woman?" Wong arched an eyebrow.

"Well, in this case, not exactly." Wanda shook her head. "It was just something a little odd, a bit of local drama, and Pietro was sick. But I think… yes, it might tell you a little about what it was like for us then. Now, remember. We were eight. We still had a couple of years before, well. Before our lives changed forever."

. . .

Sokovia of over a decade ago looked much the same as Sokovia did before the Ultron disaster, a Gothic blend of old streets and new metal that seemed a mainstay of many Eastern European cities. The Maximoffs lived down one of the oldest and still cobbled streets, on the fringe of the largest Jewish neighborhood. Being technically 'free' since the wars, it had never been labeled or openly treated as a ghetto the way occupied countries had established them, but it was nonetheless a poor area that didn't see priority services from its government. To the locals, families of mixed and richly faithful heritage that had lived there for decades, the distinction was academic. But, these families told each other with wry and knowing humor, they were alive. They could begin there. It was something.

The Maximoffs had a little more privilege than that. Magda and Jacek's home shared an alley with brighter streets, one of which led to Magda's childhood home and her Catholic mother, who despite her age always sent freshly baked treats home when the twins' mother went to caretake.

Pietro and Wanda were old enough to finally start looking different than each other, Pietro's hair starting to go lighter in the summers, preparing for the future day it would go shockingly light, and Wanda staying with the ruddy red of her birth, but their faces were still roundly plump with youth and their eyes were still the same, and they could still pretend to be the same person if their target wasn't local and they were quick and cagey about it. They always were, too, thinking alike with uncanny quickness, making them a pair for any nanny or teacher to contend with.

They were not quite identical twins, but there was something within them that made them mirror each other, and that made them strange to a lot of other families.

The older woman who had fruit stolen twice a week and simply accounted for it now in her loss sheet called them, without malice, the children of Baba Yaga, and liked to tell them that one day that old witch would come for them and drag them into her chicken-foot hut to be her witchy assistants.

Pietro, trying to hide an apple or a pear in his coat would ask sometimes, his eyes twinkling gleefully, "Does Baba Yaga have fresh fruit?"

"Baba Yaga can summon food from around the world, but she might not share it with naughty children," the shopkeeper would tell him.

"Naughty children would steal the fruit."

"And then Baba Yaga would _eat_ tasty fruit-flavored children," she'd tease him, and she'd toss him a second apple or pear so that Wanda would get one, too. "Keep your fat cheeks, boy. She'll give them a good gnaw the day she comes for you!"

Pietro would blow his cheeks up all puffy and blurp his tongue at her and everyone went away happy for the cost of two fresh fruit that children should be eating at that age, anyway.

Well, happy until the morning Wanda woke up and felt strange somehow. Like a piece of her mind was faded, or like her arm was asleep. This had happened to her twice before. Once, it was because Pietro had gotten chased away from another shopkeeper and his goods, a much crueler man with expensive pies for sale to people not like the Maximoffs, and Pietro had been scared. The other, Pietro had gotten hurt. He was naturally light on his feet, but falling off a rickety fence could hurt anyone, swift or not. Both of these were a year ago, and luck had been with them since.

Now she felt this way again. She looked over to the other bed, where her brother always slept, already knowing in that way she did that he wasn't there. She lay still, fear rising like a tendril through the back of her thoughts, and then she heard him cough in the bathroom down the hall.

Mom and Dad were already at work, and the twins weren't in school this month, so they were home alone, as they often were. Wanda sat up in the bed, and looked, and saw the light under the bathroom door. Saw how it was interrupted by a shape on the floor. The tendril in her mind became a snake, snapping tight around her amygdala, throwing her out of the bed and driving her to pat quickly across the old wooden floor. "Pietro?"

"I'm okay," said Pietro, small and thin. "I just don't feel well."

"Are you on the floor?" She could see the shadow. Of course he was.

"I'm okay, I'll be up in a moment." He didn't move. She put her hand on the door, shoving it a bit. "Just a moment!" He tried to make it sound firm, set himself to coughing again.

Wanda looked at her hand on the door, and remembered that Pietro looked pale at dinner the night before, and that he hadn't eaten like he usually did. But their parents were tired and he waved her off and kissed her forehead the way they did to each other, and that was fine, right? Kids were always okay, in the end. She didn't always have to be the lookout of the pair, the mom when Mom was gone. Things were fine. "Pietro, open the door."

"I'm- _cough_!" His voice continued to dissolve into coughing, harsh and gritty, like he was going to choke.

The tendril came back, prickly and cold. She used Dad's voice, loud and scared now. "Pietro, open this _fucking_ door right now!"

It unlocked, probably out of shock more than anything else.

. . .

"He was pale, when I opened the door. Face shiny like a fish just out of the water. I didn't have to touch him to know he had a fever. I knew what he had. The way a child knows things." Wanda had her cards stacked in her hand, one finger tapping the top of the stack rhythmically, all of her mind in the past. "There was a sickness going through the neighborhood. I don't know how I didn't get it. But it was very bad for the old. Grandparents were dying that summer, sickly and hot in homes that don't have air conditioning and sometimes only a little wind.

"Doctors cost money, which we rarely had to spare. My parents never complained when we needed one, but you're young when you first notice that tight look on their faces, when you can sense the worry, and try to tough it out to make it easier on them. There are children in the city whose arms look a little odd as they get older, and you know their casts were made by their fathers when they fell out a tree out of flat sticks and some twine and cloth. We survive, we are hardy in Sokovia, but the cost to recover results in much more to pay if you can't afford medicine."

She put the cards down, still elsewhere, still talking with her accent soft and melodious. "So you get help where you can. A few people, and a very few, talked about the _lilith_ woman, just a couple of streets over, in a decaying part of the neighborhood. They said she was a witch, or that she hated men, or other things. Worse things, mostly said by just the men. My father _never_ said such things, but also he never said to go to her for help. It was as if she didn't exist to him. But also sometimes _girls_ went to her, when they had no money or time for a doctor, and I was eight, and we were told Baba Yaga would eat us, so we weren't afraid of witches… Well. You look for the little miracles, and you take a chance."

. . .

Wanda ran down the cobbled street, afraid that her brother would fall out of bed while she was gone. She didn't know how she'd gotten him there, she wasn't that strong, but something had snapped inside her mind when the door opened and she'd seen his face. He was safe for now, tucked in, shivering, and his eyes were coin-bright with the fever. But still, she was afraid.

The woman lived in a little place next to a florist who sold almost no flowers. Wanda passed it now and again, and it smelled like bright lemony herbs and there was always a light on. But she'd never seen the woman herself, the _lilith_ , the demon and man-eater who, rumor said, crept out at night for supplies and was away again by morning.

She was said to be ugly. She was said to be someone no one liked. And the whispers, under what was said, said she'd done things for money, in other countries. But a few also said she knew something about herbs, or about medicine, and that's what Wanda clung to. It wasn't yet seven AM, the laborers were hard at work and the kids were away to the parks to play, and the neighborhood was empty but for the sick and old.

She found the door easily enough, with its peeling blue paint and the plant hung haphazardly by the door to hide the cheap and rotting electric doorbell. She hammered on it, or so her memories said, but in truth her little hand stuttered on the bell, causing it to scree in fits and starts.

There was nothing at first, and the fear that had long since turned to cast iron inside of Wanda began to rise into a hot fire again, making her want to throw up. Her hand still slammed at the doorbell, and it was still patting away when the door opened and the _lilith_ stared down at her.

Wanda was so struck that she just stared, gawping, up into the woman's face. She was _normal_ , the demon. Brown hair tied back, wearing a large, loose black shirt. There was a ring on her right hand. A silver band, a cheap one if pretty. Small wrinkles at the corners of green eyes, clearly from stress, and the woman looked tired inside and out. "What?" said the woman, short and bitter.

"My brother, he's sick with the city fever," said Wanda, suddenly realizing that she was only eight years old and didn't know this woman, didn't know anyone outside of her parents and her brother. "I don't know what to do. My parents-"

The woman disappeared inside her little home, but the door stayed open. Wanda kept staring, looking into the dark, then stepped inside when she heard rustling.

There were more herbs inside, and for a second she fully believed the woman was a witch like everyone said. But they were in nice ceramic pots painted bright colors, and some of those witchy herbs were actually recognizable and pretty flowers, and Wanda suddenly realized that the woman, the _lilith_ , was pulling a small black bag from behind a table, and putting ordinary doctor's tools into it. Wanda's voice was full of hope. "You're a doctor?"

"Nurse practitioner." The woman didn't look at her. "When did the fever start?"

"Last night, I think. He didn't eat much dinner."

"Okay, good." The woman straightened up, still a tired mess, but her eyes were awake and she didn't look angry with Wanda at all. "Take me to him."

. . .

"Yeah, keep drinking it." The woman kept pushing the cup of water to Pietro's lips, ignoring the way he coughed and looked irritated at her. "If you get dehydrated, you're going to be in some real trouble." She looked to the other side of the bed, to Wanda. "Can you afford some apple juice?"

She didn't know. A couple crumpled scraps of money appeared on the table next to Pietro.

"Now you can. That's your chore this morning. He needs fluids, rest, and keep him under the blankets. I know, it's hot as hell in here and he's sweaty, but break the fever and he'll be doing better within a day, two at most. He stays sick or gets worse, you come get me the way you did. He gets a _lot_ worse, he needs the hospital. But fluids are the key here. It's going to run its course, Wanda, if he keeps drinking." The woman stroked Pietro's forehead, smoothing away the silvery-pale hairs. It was calming him.

Wanda watched, not knowing what 'bedside manner' was, but she was seeing comfort ease her brother's face. The woman had talked to her while walking, just idle talk, and she realized it had been a way to keep _her_ calm. "I- I heard you didn't like men."

The woman smirked. "This is a boy, Wanda. He can't hurt anyone."

She didn't understand, not then. "Do you work in the hospital across the way?"

"No. I'm taking a couple of years off, okay?" The woman was back to not looking at her. "Sometimes everyone has to take a rest. For their health."

"People say such bad things about you."

"I know." She was stroking Pietro's forehead again. "Sometimes that's… just how it is. I hope you don't understand someday. You probably will, though."

"What's your name?"

"Doesn't matter, honey." The _lilith_ looked at Wanda. "You can pretend I'm a witch, it's okay. Sometimes you make things into armor, whether or not people intended it like that. It's not nice to make people afraid of you, but sometimes you can feel safer."

Again, she didn't understand, not then.

The _lilith_ smiled. "Go get him some juice. I'll wait here until you get back. That should be enough for one of the big glass jugs, okay?"

. . .

Wanda's voice trailed off. "It's not a very important story, is it? Or very good. My brother got sick, I found a nurse taking a hiatus, fortunately not far from my home, and then he was better. We had happy years after. Difficult, but happy. Until we lost each other."

Both Pandora and Aggie were looking at her, with that tense, understand look women had when they know a thing integral to the quieter experiences of being a woman. Wanda was one of them. Magic was a secondary bond. "Who was she, really?" asked Pandora.

Wanda looked down at her cards, realizing she'd been holding the game up for most of the hour. But she still kept toying with them. "I found her name later, but I'd rather not say it. She… yes. She was attacked in Austria, by two men. They got away with it, they had fine community reputations, and they were drunk, and they had good friends in good places. So she came to Sokovia, to get away from them and what had happened, and the news followed her until it became a rumor, and instead of being a witch, she was a hurt, scared woman trying to make herself better as best she could. Not all painful stories are horror stories."

Wanda looked up, tossing her red hair over her shoulder with an odd little smile. "I do understand her now."

"Is she still around? Did she get hurt in the attack?"

She laughed. "No. She is doing very well now. She's a full doctor, in Austria. Family practice. She likes babies. I visited her not long ago. She hugged me, and said she was sorry about Pietro, and I told her I was sorry for what people said and did to her, and we cried. I write sometimes. She sends back advice. She is a good woman. I've never thought of her as a _lilith_ since, which is why I didn't think of her at first - but there are, probably, still some cruel men that do."

"Yeah," said Pandora. "Yeah, there probably are."

Wong put his cards down, effectively pausing the game completely. "Would anyone like some hot chocolate next? Not from powder. I make the good stuff."

Wanda favored him with a brilliant smile, the common heaviness of the past fading from the air. "That sounds wonderful, Wong. I would love that."


	4. Zi Bu Yu

4\. Zi Bu Yu (What the Master Would Not Discuss)

. . .

It wasn't cold inside the Sanctum Sanctorum, but it was always hard to resist the childhood lure of wrapping your hands around a hot, old-style heavy ceramic mug, while leaning in to smell the steamy sweetness of the hot chocolate inside it. There were handfuls of those dried marshmallow bats floating on the surface, and the twinkling lights of the candles made the old mansion seem like a comfortable home for spooked-out children instead of a storehouse of mystery.

There was a comfortable silence at the round table, and no cards were in play. Wanda looked half asleep, and there was a small dab of hot chocolate at the corner of her mouth. Telling her tale had been a soporific - one less small but meaningful memory to carry alone. Pandora was inspecting an old, inert ritual dagger Wong had dug up for her to look at, and Aggie was peeking out the front window, making faces at the kids creeping by in the night for a handful of free candy.

"Grr!" she said, not looking particularly fierce.

A faded _AAAAaaaaugh!_ came from outside, filled with giggles.

Wong ran his hands over the table, his rough palms not catching on the silk-like polished surface. "I was thinking about your _lilith_ , Wanda. About how we create ideas out of rumor, so strong it's almost true."

Her eyes flitted open, looking at him curiously. "You sound like there's magic in that."

"Always is. Do you know Borges?"

She shook her head.

"Jorge Luis Borges, one of the greatest writers of the last century. He wrote a story called _The Circular Ruins_ , about a man who secreted himself away to create a soul out of pure thought, to will him into existence, and then, in an act of love, sent him away to live out a full, real life in a nearby temple. But the chance his creation would discover the secret of his birth drove the man to torment, fearing for his creation's reality, his sanity. And then, in our protagonist's final hour, he realizes he, too, was another's dream. And so, the circle continues." Wong leaned back in his chair. "Thoughtforms. The dream made into reality. It's a fairly commonplace concept in magic, although the extreme results are rarer and much more difficult to create." He smiled at her, to ease the segue. "Specifically, my mind wandering from your tale, I was thinking about _tulpas_."

"I've _heard_ of _those_ ," said Pandora, suddenly amused. He looked at her.

"I was a contributor on Ill's big piece on the tulpas made by the hardcore My Little Pony fanbase. Our photog got a blurry pic in one of the dudes' basements that the guy _swore_ was his Pinkie Pie tulpa."

Wong's face pinched inward so hard it was almost a visual representation of his soul trying to force its way out of this reality entirely. Wanda's hand went to her face, covering, and not very well, her sudden attack of the giggles. It was enough to draw Aggie back to the table.

"Hey, we got an award for our coverage."

"I hope they keep the trophy in a visitor's bathroom." Wong put up a hand. "Not another word on them. I am begging you. Some horrors need no discussion."

"Cyclopean mutations and children's cartoons. Sounds fair." Aggie took her place at the table. "You sound like you're building up to something."

"I am, yes." Wong nodded to her. "Suppose it's my turn to contribute a tale to the table…"

. . .

"Several years ago, I met my father for the first time. I didn't know him for many years, because my mother took me away and raised me in Hong Kong. My father is a Party man, well connected in the Politburo. He's been in place since before Xi Jinping took power, and I am to understand they know each other quite well. My mother wanted to insulate me from this, ensure that I had the choice of my own thoughts and my own decisions. It was the greatest gift she felt she could give me, a chance to see the whole of China, not just what our people are told it must be. It took a long time before I understood all of this, of course.

"Now, my father believes he is a good man, and he believes he has a good, well-educated son who works in libraries around the world. This has a wonderful benefit to me, being mostly true." Wong smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "So he welcomes me when I visit, and his offices are quite useful to Kamar-Taj and to my own work. You see, my father is also, specifically, in an oversight position regarding China's museums and archaeological sites."

The smile came again, the wryness deepening, but touched with sadness and disapproval. "The Party finds our vast history to be useful, and a source of great Chinese pride - when it can be managed."

Wong leaned forward, knowing his audience was hooked in. "There is much here I could tell you that is concerning, about what curios have disappeared, about what fragments of history are hidden - stolen - to profit someone who sits on it like a dragon. About how the Party absorbs what it can of Tibetan history and lore and power, but please know. I love my people, my country, my history. The Party is… hard to explain, when you've not had to live with it. It is a deep story all of its own. But not a good one for tonight."

"So instead, it's a few years before I meet Stephen. And my good friend and mentor has traveled with me from Tibet to the heart of Beijing, the Xicheng District, where my father works within the Academy."

. . .

The Ancient One smiled, secure in the knowledge that no one saw her or Wong walking down the busy street, nor that, in a moment, anyone would see Wong in his wrapped magician's robes. A wrinkle of Wong's hand and he looked like a businessman, neatly put together in a fine suit with expensive shoes and a pair of cufflinks that said, truthfully, that the librarian of the world's grimoires was an Oxford graduate. She remained hidden between the blinks of seconds, people's lives crackling around her like shards from a mirror, them catching only glimpses of saffron yellow out of the corners of their eyes. Pollen on the wind. "Thank you for doing this, Wong. I know it's still complicated for you."

"The value of doing something will always outweigh the cost of my doing nothing. The choice was simple." Wong finished fidgeting with his cuffs, shooting his wrists out to snap them to the proper inch or so of display. His father was easily distracted by illusion, and the best illusions worked simply and without excess magic. "We still have someone watching the man's cot?"

"Of course. Mordo sent word, he's still sleeping." She inclined her head. "As one would, after such a creation. The question remains, will he ever wake up?" There was a tinge of doubt in her voice. Enough so that she'd agreed with the others that it was necessary to look elsewhere for answers to their riddles.

"A tulpa." Wong shook his head. "Why did a man with no identity come to the edge of our home to make a tulpa?" And why had it done what it did after - left its creator all but hollowed of energy and slipped back east into China, as if directed not by its maker, but by something else. A near-impossibility for a magical construct, such things usually bound to serve until the maker itself slips the leash on his own senses of reality. Not while dozing, not so quick. It had been easy to know it had happened, the energy of the tulpa's birth lighting up the streets outside the sanctum's hidden door like a flare. The trail it left felt deliberate.

The Ancient One put a hand high on Wong's arm, her palm as warm as her smile. "You have my full confidence, old friend. You'll find out."

And quickly, Wong hoped. The wizards and warriors of Kamar-Taj learned to assess their own instincts. A good, common sense hunch was often better than a prophecy. His said this ought to be sorted out, now, before things grew dangerous. In his pocket were the few personal scraps they'd found on the man, things he could use to triangulate an identity. But for that, he needed access.

Wong bowed to his friend, small but respectful, because that was who he was. When he rose, she was gone, and he was alone on a street full of hundreds of busy souls.

. . .

Wong looked at his father, frozen in a flash of green. It wasn't easy, harnessing Kamar-Taj's greatest treasure for a little trick like this one, but The Ancient One had not only authorized it but captured the lick of power herself in an old brocade pouch. The richly appointed room of a public official would hold where it was for as long as Wong needed it - and raw computer data didn't know the rules of time.

He looked at the closed door of the office on defensive instinct. There was already a ward on it, a subtle press of power that would guide a well-meaning intruder off towards coffee instead, or a phone call, or towards someone they thought called their name. Then he took the empty swivel chair and moved it towards the computer terminal behind his father. The touch of his hand freed the chair from the locked moment in time, and the passwords to the system were already known to him.

Father kept everything in a black book, in the bottom drawer of his desk. A good, regimented man, a respectable and predictable member of the Chinese community. Wong looked at him, the silvery brushed back hair, the expensive - but not distastefully expensive - suit, the red tie with the Party clip on it, and thought about how distanced he felt from the man locked away in time. By all accounts, a decent man.

And a member of a regime that had turned a country into something so different from the China Wong knew from his mother's memories that it felt like an alien world. He looked back to the computer, discomfited, unsettled, and wanting to go home - to Kamar-Taj, or to Hong Kong, which he still loved. Instead, he logged in, and began to search.

. . .

Searching the unknown man left on a straw mat inside a home just blocks away from the entrance of Kamar-Taj had given up scant clues. There was a scrap of paper with a set of numbers on it, a strap of thickly braided strings with each string a different color, and a wrinkled piece of a burnt photo. With it was the worry that these things had been left deliberately, not just shoved away in a pocket as most life's detritus was. Beyond that, they knew the man had come from China from the remnants of his aether trail, and so, Wong let the computer run its searches for both the number string and a cross-check through the archeological systems for the uploaded bit of landscape seen in the photo. It would be the best resource, even better than Google Maps. China had so much surveillance footage of the country, it could probably pinpoint a cat hair on a temple shingle. But it would take time.

He toyed with the strings while staring at the ruined photo, his fingernails separating out each of the ten threads, no rhyme or reason to their colors or pairing that he could discern. Blue and black, blue and gold, green and blue, twinned reds, white and purple. Not harmonious, yet blended as one.

The photo could be any windswept basin, perhaps even from out in Mongolia, or Russia's Siberian plains during balmier weather. Wong shook his head, unsure, as the computer crunched along, doing its best. Because he was in a frozen pocket of time, he had no idea how long it was really taking, but he could hear its fans going, the system running hot, scanning millions of pictures for any sort of geological match.

He looked at his father again, and Wong thought about time, and he was beginning to approach the horizon of the scholar's melancholy when the computer interrupted his thoughts with a soft chime.

It had found the location he needed. He leaned towards the monitor, absorbing what it told him.

It was a picture of the desert, yes. Specifically, a portion of the Dzungarian Basin, one of the Gobi Desert's subregions. A cold, dry place. This was pinpointed to a desolate slice of land about an hour outside of Karamay. An Uyghur city. Wong paused, considering the deepness of the issues present here. There were attached files from the Party, all linking to the targeted area. There was a great deal of information he could access, all of it crossfiled, all of it requiring high access levels, some of which might even surpass what he could get to through his father's codes. The computer, unless handled carefully, was going to send an alert to the proper authorities that he was looking at the region.

He understood immediately why. The camps.

He averted the warning subroutine, wiped the computer clean of his searches, and let time flow again into a quiet moment between an estranged father and son, having tea in a world where good men didn't discuss what happened behind the curtain of their smiles.

. . .

"They are putting people in camps in China," said Wong to his audience. He said it in such a clean and neutral way that it paradoxically made clear how angry he felt. "Even now. The programs were already running then. People who don't believe in things the right way, the 'Chinese way.' The Muslim Chinese, many of them are being pulled away in the night, some of them under the guise of stopping terrorism." Wong's face turned hard. "I know of no man turned from evil by crushing him under a boot painted in all the colors of fear. I know of many men who become that evil instead, when they are at last freed. Out of fear, out of pain, out of anger at what was done to them.

"The Party denies these things are happening, particularly to what terrible extent. But I have heard other stories, and seen some myself before this tale." He inclined his head. "Tibet is no stranger to what is being done. The man who oversaw my second adopted home and increased surveillance upon all its people oversees this region now, Xinjiang. It is a naturally escalated situation that he has repressed and interned so many people in his new province, we were not surprised when he began his work there. There are millions, perhaps, are suffering under him. And no few are dying.

"So now my mystery is deepened. Is the man that came nearly to our door a refugee, one who turned to magic in desperation, to free a spirit to defend himself? Or was he something else? Something darker but equally desperate?"

"A complicated matter may best require the simplest response to solve. I put myself on a train to Karamay, to go and find the place in the photograph myself. And to see what connection the numbers had to the tulpa's maker."

. . .

Karamay was, on the surface, a pinnacle of Chinese engineering and profitability. An oil city now occupied by a people that had made its Uyghur founders that repressed minority, it was today one of the richest places in the country. Its distance from the better known eastern parts of China was its strength and weakness both. Parks and ponds sprinkled the heart of the city, in defiance of nature's demand. Skyscrapers fought the horizon, and all around it, the desert still fought to reclaim its realm.

Beyond the city were the oil fields and refineries, and beyond that was rougher terrain where the hardy went to explore. There were few roads outside the city itself, and much of the travel to and from was done by rail. That was how Wong arrived, and he ignored the city's glamor itself in favor of feeling his way through the shadows and trails all around it, instead.

Finding a tulpa, or any thoughtform of that nature, was going to be difficult if it stayed in the city. Now that the creation had been given time to solidify itself as a physical being on this plane, its trail would be far more faded than what had been sensed in Tibet. It could move among the throngs of people, even live like one of them, if it wanted, if it had been shaped like its maker.

That was something he didn't know yet. But the connection to this place was real - the photograph giving the creation a locus to revolve around. If he could find it, he would, in all likelihood, solve the riddle of the sleeping man's identity.

What he didn't expect was how easy the trail was to find. Wong had followed a scent trail of aether towards the city center, near the government buildings on a hunch. And there, the flare had lit again. Deliberately. Drawing him towards it, immediately recognizing he was a moth in enemy land.

It surrounded one of the buildings, that flare. A spout of energy that licked all around it, flame-red and tinged with a color at the edge of Wong's ability to sense. He extended his palms toward the building, and he went cold.

The aetheric flame was a warning, within it an alert intended specifically for him. Implicit in it was a choice. He didn't have time yet to riddle out the nuances of the wordless message. The building hid within it a destructive core, a burst of power intended to destroy, and to hurt hundreds of citizens. He could interfere, suggested the message, or he could… not.

Wong did not hesitate. He knew his people well. It took scant minutes to get the building to evacuate, even with his face sliding from the memories of the security forces. People slipped away from it in an organized march, looking at each other with confusion as they waited to be told what to do next. Wong waited long enough to see, through magic sight, the elite force going into the basement of the facility and finding the bomb left there. It would harm no one, now.

The aetheric sense slipped away from him, leaving behind a trail of more empathetic emotion. Wong felt it trickle past him - disappointment, sorrow, judgment. Now he could think about this. A tulpa that was willing to kill, and wanted not just a witness, but a willing accomplice in the man following its trail.

It left a trail of its own, snaking through the air, and it beckoned him to follow. The next message was implicit: The tulpa had no interest in hiding from him. It wanted to talk.

. . .

Wong didn't bother with a car. He could sense the trail of the tulpa well enough to portal himself along stretches of it, marking his path and anchoring a safe location before his first step so that he could easily flit away if things went sour. He expected them to. Historically, sudden encounters with supernatural beings after an attempted terrorist attack never seemed to go well for anyone.

There was a whole aisle of chronicles on the topic back at Kamar-Taj. He knew several of the best (worst) stories by heart, including the legend of an ancient Atlantean psi-scholar who had delved down to the bottom of the ocean to give an elemental water-lord a piece of his mind after a freak waterstorm, and he got jumped by an unknown number of horrible things the water-lord had quietly made friends with in amidst the flow-currents of its own realm. Because the psi-scholar had spent the last two centuries being an asshole to the water-lord.

The psi-scholar was neatly returned to the surface, outwardly physically intact, but his brain had been turned into a bowl of cream of wheat.

There were a number of useful laws and rules of magic codified in grimoires throughout reality. The most useful rule of all seldom needed to be written down, and if it did, well, the sorcerer affected probably had it coming: Don't be a dick, and _especially_ don't be a dick to supernatural things unless you know precisely what the fuck is going on with them.

Wong didn't know what the tulpa's deal was yet. Wong was going to be polite, chatty, neutral in all other respects until he had a better idea how things stood, and he had his little finger primed on the trigger of a spell to get him the hell out of the province _tout suite_ if it looked bad. Because Wong paid attention to the lessons he read, and Wong was no one's dummy.

The trail of the tulpa took him past the oil fields that nestled between gloomy, crackle-dry hills. Evening was coming on fast, good for the tulpa, not so great for Wong. The trail grew stronger in the gloaming light, the tulpa feeding itself on the general fear all people had of the dark. Especially in parts of the world that still lived by sacred traditions. He wondered what it looked like. Did it look like the sleeping man in Tibet, giving them a chance to finally identify the person himself, or did it look like something… else? Fed and changed by the dark following after Wong towards the creature.

He made it to the center of a small, flat plain, a place that held nothing in it but a little scrub, and the soft rush of the night wind. Even that faded after a moment, making the place into an echo of the eternal void, that place _between_ , where all sorcerers know the rules of all they've known of reality becomes thin, and physical worlds can change forever.

"I am," whispered the tulpa in an ancient Chinese dialect Wong didn't recognize for it was no longer spoken, the words of the Shang dynasty alive for an impossible second. The hairs on Wong's neck rose, feeling the breath of the creature against his ear. "I seek," whispered the tulpa in another dialect, Yue Cantonese, the sounds he'd grown up with. "I _hunt_ ," it finished in the Beijing dialect, the prestige dialect of Mandarin.

"I am the librarian of Kamar-Taj," said Wong in Yue with an evenness he dredged up from the primal base of all his training. He of course didn't offer his real name right away, that was a sucker's bet. "Your tether is sleeping."

"My tether chose this. I am what he needs now. I am the message, and the messenger, and today I hunt for an answer in your word. Kamar-Taj, you are its advocate here. _Look at me_." The tulpa had a voice of steel.

Wong stepped forward to give himself a certain amount of space, and then turned, with the polite bow he favored. He lifted his head and looked at the tulpa, and saw how it shimmered between two faces - the man that had made it, and, he presumed, the other figure that it now served. An eerie effect. Wong saw what it meant - the tulpa was not fully free from its maker, not the way it wanted. Yet. "What are the numbers that were left with the man?"

"A riddle with no answer." The tulpa's awful, shifting face split in a deathshead grin. "A sheet of one-use code, meant to help my maker past the border."

Wong considered that with a frown. It meant a form of intelligence service, but likely not one from the government. He slowly put his hand in his pocket and came up with the length of string. Ten strands, woven as one. "Then I presume this is the answer to another riddle?"

"It is, sorcerer. Look at me. Look at it. Do you see?"

Wong looked at it again, looking at the colors, and wondering. And then he remembered that old legend, and the rumor it became when his ancestors were taken to the west, and then he thought of other things. "Oh, shit," he murmured in English, and he almost tripped his escape spell right there. He understood, abruptly, the nature of its intel and its purpose, and he understood why the first greeting had been through a choice of violence. But then, he also decided, running would be rude. Rude enough to cause worse things in his wake. He put the string away. "What do your masters want with Kamar-Taj?"

"You accept that you are speaking as their advocate, librarian."

"I do, tulpa speaking on behalf of the Ten."

The tulpa looked down at him, seeing him full, its eyes glittering black at the acknowledgment. "Look around us, librarian, look around us, and see what has become of our land."

"I know," said Wong. He bowed his head, respectful. "There is a great darkness within China."

"And that darkness threatens your libraries, librarian. It threatens Tibet. It threatens the sanctum in Hong Kong. It means New York will find no protection. And London is meaningless to us, colonized and left aside." The tulpa leaned towards him. "For the cost of our history, that darkness will remake us, kill our people, the ones who have been here all along. You can feel their pain. A camp is nearby, librarian, one that is not spoken of in the lists. Our people are dying within it. Will Kamar-Taj stand aside and watch, as it has watched atrocities before? Will _you_ stand aside, librarian?"

Wong was silent, choosing the way to phrase his words. He also selected the Beijing dialect to speak, formal and clear, because he could. He studied the tulpa meanwhile, looking at the way it divided itself, looking at the pieces of it and seeking the scraps of its creation. "We at Kamar-Taj protect, and teach, and grow. You are the ones who burn, tulpa of the Ten, and though I will stand here on behalf of us and say, also with my own voice, that I _understand_ in a way that hurts me deeply, I _cannot_ vouch us to your cause. We cannot help you burn the darkness away, not in your way. For it is not _our_ way, and has not been, for just as long as the legends speak of you."

"That is a disappointment, librarian." The tulpa sounded unsurprised, calm in a way that concerned Wong. "This was a courtesy between two ancient forces, do you understand?"

"You are the messenger, tulpa. I have received it and you with courtesy." He continued to study the creature in the shape of the man. "I thank you for your own courtesy, though I must allow myself disapproval at your first greeting."

"We understand, and we will not stop." The tulpa cocked its head at him, sleek blackness running along its edges. "The sunset is coming for Kamar-Taj. Change, that dirty river, will sweep you within it. What is ancient will become new marble. Our masters have seen that other moment of darkness, falling from the West, consuming what you have been, showing you the darkest magics. When you understand what this riddle means, in the short years after, we will, as courtesy demands, offer such a meeting again, and offer this choice again. You or your next advocate's refusal then means that your fate has been chosen. Do you understand this, librarian?"

"I do, tulpa of the Ten." Wong bowed. "I thank you for the time granted to consider. Do you understand that, by our tradition, I am concerned about leaving a creation such as yourself free?"

"It is understandable, librarian. We expected nothing else, and it is why we gave message in this form." The voice became mocking. "Can you do anything about it?"

"You are the tulpa of Jun Han," said Wong, his head still bowed. A whistle rose in the air, high and wild like laughter at the sound of the binding name, a true-name given magical purpose. "I read your name in your bones as you spoke. You are thus severed, and we will now question your first master, in our halls, to verify what we have said to one another. We mean no offense by this action."

The laughter continued, almost delighted. "Understood, librarian." The tulpa began to fade into the darkness of the night, its purpose complete. Before it was fully dissipated, one more whisper, close again to his ear. "We have seen you - _Wong_."

Wong stood alone now on the plain, staring at a night full of stars, and now he was afraid.

. . .

Aggie looked at him as his voice trailed off. "The Ten. I saw that in a file somewhere, but it's pretty high above my security grade."

Wong smiled, a lopsided and rueful thing. "The West has some… unfortunate records of the legend I refer to when I speak of the Ten." He inclined his head. "In truth, the truth itself is difficult to make clear. There are men today who have used the legend to paint themselves as something dangerous, and they have done so with little understanding or respect. The Mandarin incident, I refer to." Wong said the name with open disrespect. "Mr. Stark had some dealings with a fool who assumed the Ten was something to toy with, like the Gobi Death Worm. I am to understand certain of his associates have paid for this mistake."

He leaned back in his chair. "An earlier encounter was closer to the truths I know - a man named Raza claimed dubious connection to the Ten, committing terrorism and also nearly killing Stark in their name. I am not sure of the accuracy of this claim, however. In parts of the East, the Ten is a convenient demon to act in the name of, for they themselves will not speak to confirm or deny their approval.

"But the Ten is more than these small assumptions. They have acted quietly for a long time. They have been seen as many things. Apocalypse cults, terrorists, ancient sorcerers, businessmen, spirits… but they have _always_ existed. To the West, it makes for a useful, often hateful stereotype. To us, it is a warning. That China has a long history - and history does not forget."

He leaned forward again. "It is difficult in certain ways to tell this story. What this agent of the Ten used to sway me, it's understandable. It's painfully understandable. I am _furious_ about what is being done in my country." An expression of pain crossed his face. "But the methods suggested by the tulpa, by its casual violence… I understand. But that is not me. And it is not what I have been taught. Yet it presses on the fear that it is because we are cowed by outside expectations. That Kamar-Taj is changed by what the world is becoming."

"The ancients becoming marble…" Pandora frowned, sharing a look with Wanda. "The Ancient One is since gone, I heard."

"And Stephen Strange is a popular new face in magic." Wong nodded. "The Ten believe we are being Westernized, and they would think it odious. Obscure but simple enough, as prophecies and riddles go. It has now been a few years since the tulpa's warning to us."

Wong then smiled, and in it was no real joy. "I expect that other visit in short time. And I expect that I will have to advocate for Kamar-Taj once again." He flicked his hand, and in their goblets appeared more hot chocolate, thick and delicious, its presence warming the room anew. "Our answer will be the same, I think. But in it will be a riddle of our own - how _will_ Kamar-Taj finally fight for itself and its people?

"Because I don't think we should look to that dangerous history as any part of our salvation. We must also look to ourselves, for new courage." He picked up the cards again, and prepared to deal a new round of the game. "It will be interesting to see how we've changed. Because I agree with certain other sorcerers of our joint knowledge. Change is not only a fearful necessity, it is a power all its own."

Wanda spoke up, and she looked worried. "What happened to the sleeping man? Jun Han?"

"Kamar-Taj questioned him to verify some of what had been said to me. We helped him recover his strength. And then, because we have no jurisdiction and because he himself had done nothing dangerous, we let him free to return to China." Wong looked away. "However, there was no question that he would rejoin a group content to harm civilians, the way his tulpa intended to. So an anonymous call was made to a Party member in China, and Jun Han was surveilled upon his return. I do not know what happened after that." Silence followed his words, the implications clear enough. "I am not comfortable with the end to his story. But that is the reality I have, Wanda. It's not simple, is it?"

She reached out and touched the back of his hand with the tips of her fingers. "No, it isn't. But I believe you tried to do your best."

He patted her hand with his other one, nodding in gratitude. "Thank you, Wanda."


	5. Joy Ride

5\. Joy Ride

. . .

The pile of marshmallow bats had undergone some reorganization. As midnight approached, Wanda seemed to tap into some inner gambler's fire and had grown for herself a decent-sized marshmallow kingdom. This was amusing the _shit_ out of Wong, who kept poking at the little towers she was making out of her winnings. They fell over, she mock-glared at him and carefully rebuilt her towers, he would do it again when she looked away.

"Got the journo to talk to you last. All right, gang. I got you. One last story for the night - and I promise, there's a _real_ monster at the end of this book. So to speak." Pandora grinned at the rest of the party, wicked and cheery both. "I tell tales a little oddly. It's the way I was taught in college, so just bear with me here.

"So let me set the endstage first - this is just a couple of months ago, and the boss has caught me in the hall just beyond the library…"

. . .

"Kill it." Loki looked down at Pandora Peters, his face stony and his voice harsh. He had a hand on one of the double doors leading into the library, clearly wanting to return to whatever the hell it was he was doing in the ensorcelled, eccentric nook he carved out for himself in there. She could smell incense and other things, like the lightning snap of magic and the dustiness of untouched books that hadn't been sleeping here on Earth. A copy of the final report on the 'complications' that came up during the now-closed antiques case was in his other hand. "It's an unnecessary tale."

She stared back at him, unmoved. "I think it's pretty damn necessary, people knowing it's safe again in their neighborhoods. Knowing they don't have to be afraid to leave a kid in a car for a minute while they run inside the pharmacy, knowing they aren't gonna find any pieces of them in the hills, knowing they can sleep a little better for a while."

"Not all of it. Not _that_." He shoved the report at her. "You know full well what I mean. Kill it. Or, if you must, find a way to shift the report around enough to fog the conclusions."

"Or change your mind." She didn't move, didn't take the folder, outright flinging his previous words at him. Loki sounded colder than the last time she had this sort of fight with him, and she thought she knew why, but she wasn't going to budge. Not for his feelings, not over _this_. He could deal. He just didn't want to. She'd been here long enough to see that.

Something hardened in his face before he looked away. She hadn't won yet. "Good luck with that," said Loki, and he tossed the report onto a table that sat just inside the library itself. He swept back towards his lair, not looking at her, clearly not up to discussing the incident any further.

. . .

 ** _THE COLDWELL TRIBUNE_**

MARCH 14th, 2018

 **THREE MORE CHILDREN MISSING**

 _By_ Miriam Attensio

At a press conference outside city hall this morning, State Police have confirmed reports that three children were abducted from a parking lot in Weisen in an incident this past Thursday. The children, who are not being currently identified by name, are ages 7, 9, and 10. Two of the abductees are brother and sister, with the third a friend of the younger child, who was present when an unknown assailant broke the window of the unidentified family's sedan.

Police have not confirmed that this is related to previous abductions, nor to the murder of Abilene May, 6, last November, although city mayor Robert McDaniel has claimed in interviews that he believes all incidents are connected, causing concern throughout the county.

Police are however working with parents and school groups to increase neighborhood watch programs, and any sightings of suspicious vehicles or activity are being directed to the dedicated hotline announced at the press conference.

Witness reports submitted to reporters indicate a sighting of a brown SUV or van in the area of all reported incidents, however police declined to confirm that there was in fact a connection.

Abilene May was taken from the backyard of her home, and her body was found several weeks later in the Carnassy Hills by a pair of hunters. The other abductees have not yet been found.

In interviews with retired police chief Abraham Zelick, he suggested that….

. . .

 ** _THE COLDWELL TRIBUNE_**

APRIL 3rd, 2018

 **MORE BODIES FOUND IN WEST CARNASSY HILLS**

 _By_ Miriam Attensio

Identities of four bodies found near the Sleepytime Campgrounds have been confirmed by police at a somber press conference last night. The victims are Jeffrey Scarabeo, 7, Michael Windstone, 9, Hilary Scarabeo, 10, and Morgan Ban, also 9, a previous victim reported missing three weeks prior. Also found at the scene were several items confirmed to have belonged to previous victim Abilene May. The FBI is now officially working with state police and a profiler has been dispatched…

. . .

Pandora Peters scratched down her notes on the casefile, looking up as General Talbot waved off the 'competing' incident she had dutifully filed when running the scene in Idaho. "Look, nobody's saying dead kids are a good thing, but it's not under SHIELD's jurisdiction. Police and FBI have this handled, we'd just be sticking our fingers in the pot and messing up the flavor."

Neutrally, because this was the most high-handed, stick up the ass white dude she'd ever dealt with, and she'd dealt with a few in her line of work, Pandora said, "Never suggested that, sir." Which was true at its core. She thought it was bullshit that they _weren't_ doing anything, considering they had wider resources and more highly trained manpower, but she supposed she understood that these resources were fixated on 'larger' issues than dead kids. Like living, walking weapons, rogue alien sorcerers, etcetera. Okay, sort of fair.

She still privately thought it would be nice if they _volunteered_.

She also thought his stewpot analogy blew, but that was beside the point.

Her statement seemed to pause Talbot before he went on about it. "No, you didn't. Anyway," he said, trying to get his balance back. "Our people have a report that the volatile actor has been taking the freeways through that region to get to his accomplice. I think that's the more important detail here. Let's get back to that."

The 'volatile actor' was apparently some sort of rare antiques dealer that focused on the kinds of antiques that caused horror movies to happen in real life, and also tended to get his wares for 'free.' In horrifically violent, magical ways. Sometimes ironically using the stuff he'd stolen. Yorkes had been active in slow bursts over the last twenty years, but had also begun to escalate recently for unknown reasons. It had come to them through the Sanctum hotline, and promptly gone to Loki, and now, because of the serial killer also active in the general area of their current investigation, it had all become some sort of dumb fucking mess of interdepartmental politics.

Pandora put her notes down and looked at Loki, silent and still in an office chair that hadn't squeaked or swiveled in at least fifteen minutes. He caught her glance and looked back, his face blankly serene.

Oh, he was annoyed as _shit_.

Coulson also knew this. Talbot, probably fortunately, did not. Coulson took over the conversation from where he was sitting at the director's desk. "It's worth noting that if we move in to observe and possibly corner our guy if he comes back into the area the way analytics predicts, it's going to cross wires with the local effort. If we're going to overlap _anyway_ , hey, two birds with one stone."

"Coulson."

He trucked on. " _And_ we get to look good. Which, General, isn't all that bad of an idea right now." Coulson smiled at the telecom image of his nominal boss, his hands cupped together neatly on the desk.

That almost cracked the wall. Pandora watched the man's face contort, thinking this over. And then: "No. Keep it compartmented, Coulson. If we turn this into something complicated for their guys, the backlash isn't worth it." He seemed to realize he didn't sound particularly empathetic, so he made an effort. "They're gonna catch their guy out there. I know the profiler the FBI sent out, he's gonna dog this son of a bitch and get any of the kids back that he can. They're not going to lose any more."

Coulson rang off. Pandora said out loud the thing she'd been sitting on. "We could still help. No skin off our ass."

"I know, Peters. I know." Coulson looked at Loki, who'd gone back to looking barely here. "You still plan on personally overseeing the op out there?"

"Mm."

"That's the final word from Talbot, then, I guess. Catch your guy, keep any other agents you pull in out of the other team's nosehairs."

"That's very florid, Coulson, thank you. My life is further enriched by the thought of human nasal detritus." He didn't move. "I'll file once I'm ready to set out."

"You sure you're not about to die right there in that chair?"

"It's not a dramatic enough exit from this world, I suppose I'll keep living until a better opportunity presents." He still didn't move, although now his immobility somehow seemed to gain an almost tangible aura of sarcasm. "Agent Peters?"

She didn't move, seeing a chance and going for it. "Mm."

The subtle mockery made him smile, a faint twitch at the corner of his lips, only there if one looked for it, and she was doing exactly that. He was an unapologetic asshole, but he was the exact sort of asshole she sort of hated herself for genuinely liking. "Please keep an eye on their chatter for me, I wouldn't want to _upset_ Talbot and tread where we're not wanted."

"You want that based off public information, or am I digging for everything?"

"Everything." He glanced at Coulson as Pandora absorbed that. "For the purpose of staying out of someone's nostrils, naturally."

Coulson shrugged, visibly unconcerned. Loki had long since earned his trust. "Just keep me updated."

"Of course."

. . .

One side effect of Pandora's current duty on the eldritch antiques case meant that she was essentially running a shadow operation - know everything, see everything, and interfere with nothing, by paradoxically and actively operating on that silently gathered information.

The other was that unintentionally, she also became a temporary sort of half-assed office manager, organizing travel and hotel, all in the name of keeping that level of non-intervention stable. It was like a hectic real life game of Tetris, played on hard, with that fucking Russian jingle stuck in her head every time she had to adjust someone on the advance scout team's plans. Fortunately, no one on Loki's chosen team for this was a known dickhead, and even Loki himself had certain long-installed courtesies. No one _ever_ made her feel like the hired goddamn help. They thanked her. They brought her coffee and bagels from the good bakery down the street. That, for Pan, was a big deal.

So it was a bit of a throw when Loki showed up in the tiny office she'd taken over as her own personal command center and said, "I've arranged my own hotel."

Pandora sat down in the stolen chair, heavy, wondering how much of this she was about to have to unfuck. "Okay, but if you're down in the tri area, then-"

"I'm not. I'm playing a hunch, Agent Peters." He inclined his head, softening the sharpness in his natural tone. "You suggested a handful of regular routes our target is taking through the area."

"And unfortunately a _lot_ of them overlap with the manhunt around the edge of the city." They were focusing on a handful of neighborhoods near the Carnassy Hills, places with a good radius to spin out towards each abduction location, and that were far behind on public services and things like traffic cams. An old neighborhood, with a lot of old folks that knew all the ins and outs of the region. At this point, the SHIELD team knew as much as the local police, and often about as fast. It really was like they were the town's own ghosts, just behind those of the lost children. It was good logic. There was an outlier theory from the profiler that the team was morbidly taking bets about - the outsider theory. That one was the one that usually threw her the wrench on forward planning.

"This one doesn't. Out by Route 9, I haven't seen it on any of the FBI's recon sheets."

Pan tapped at her tablet to pull up the fastcheck spreadsheet she'd put together, but she was already pretty sure he was right. And on their own case, it was a long shot route. "You're right. It's not a priority track, though. We think Yorkes is running east-west, not through there." She looked up from the tablet. "I still can't believe his own brother dropped the final tidbit."

Loki slouched against the frame of the door. "Something rather odd about that whole family, but _I_ can't judge from odd."

Stacy and Dale Yorkes kept tripping the SHIELD observation services, but nobody could quite figure out why. Standard check-ins seemed to show exactly what was in the papers: A nice, upstanding family with a role in a high-power charity organization out west. They had a daughter, looked like a good kid.

It was the brother of Dale that seemed to be a problem, Asher. Could even be that it was his string of eccentric, magical thefts that had been tripping their alarms for so long. Pandora shook her head, still scrolling through her notes. "In any case, I don't think you're going to mess anything up if you strike out in that direction, but I also don't know what your hunch thinks it's going to find."

"Maybe nothing. Maybe just a bad trucker's breakfast."

"Wait. _All_ the way out on 9?" She looked up at him, taken aback by how casually he'd suggested something rather outside his usual fastidious character. "By the turnpike? Damn, man, you're not exactly gonna get a turn-down service and a mint on your pillow anywhere out there."

"To be honest, I expect that if I try to report the roach I will almost certainly see, they'll try to charge me for double occupancy." He grinned, a fangy and amused thing. "It's my good deed of the month, coming in under my expense budget."

"It'll make Talbot happy."

The smile widened, crueler now, but not at her. "And we all know how I just _live_ for that."

. . .

Preliminary expense memo, Apr-May, WAND Dept, [FILE TO ACCOUNTING dsk 4.1] AGENT Locke /FILENAME LOKI/ ID #616196285:

Budget: $1,500 agent per week / up to three (3) wks field

Predicted: $50 per d. motel, dry cleaning $75 on 3 day cycle, $400 food 2 receipts sent per wk - $800 total wk

Actual: /PENDING/

Signature: _ xx/xx/xxxx

 _Note from accounting, not for distribution_ : this motherfcker is really paying all that money for food when his ass is holed up in a roach motel? What is he doing, driving every night from a Wagon Wheel motor court-lookin' place time traveled from the 70's to now out to a Michelin star foodie hole for some foie gras?

 _Note from SHIELD accounting supervisor, not for distribution_ : Please refrain from injecting personal opinions into expense reports, as per regulations 9.2.31.

Also, I know, right?

. . .

The lone Yelp! review for the Sunshine Sunset Motor Court & RV Parking Facility, off Route 9, South Coldwell, Idaho:

 **ONE STAR** : DO NOT COME HERE! STAFF IS NO HELP. RV FACILITY HAD NO GAS ON SALE DURING OUR ENTIRE VISIT. BED LINENS WERE _DIRTY_.

 **Edit:** _WE BROUGHT HOME BEDBUGS!_

. . .

INTERNAL COPY

CARNASSY HILLS KILLER: suspect Jonathan Ham Wakerobin / video transcribed /

Detective L. Canton

Deputy Morgan Gladmark

Brandon Kope, Desk Clerk, Sunshine Sunset MC/RV - witness statement being offered

Detective A. Bianchi - FBI

Interviewed without counsel present

Detective Canton: This is Detective Langdon Canton of the Carnassy County Sheriff's office in Coldwell, Idaho. I have with me Deputy Gladmark, also from the Carnassy County Sheriff's office, and also witnessing is FBI Detective Al Bianchi, from the Idaho Bureau office.

Detective Bianchi: Thank you. I'm observing this witness's statement on behalf of my office, and on the behalf of Agent Frank Mintz, our profiler, who couldn't be here today.

Canton: Okay, Mr. Kope, could you please state your name, spell your last name, and give us your date of birth.

Kope: That's Kope, Brandon Kope, K-O-P-E, 6/23/84. Am I in trouble?

C: You're not, Mr. Kope. Could you please spell your first name, too?

Kope: B-R-A-N-D-O-N. Um…

C: Thank you. Relax, man, you're not in any trouble. We just need to get your statements on the record about what you saw. So, um, could you begin with the first time you saw Mr. Wakerobin, or your long-term impressions of him from what you can recall?

Kope: Wakerobin's been a regular, he usually brings in his tractor-trailer over from the city-

C: City?

Kope: Yeah, he's a long hauler in Boise, I think, his loop usually goes back west through us to get home. He's a nice guy, really kidlike, like, he started coming over before I worked here? I've only been here since, like, January? But he was never a problem. The boss made it a point to give him that good, quiet room over on the end, one of our better places. It got marked out for him, we never rented it out to anyone else because he was by all the time. Officer?

C: Yeah, sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you.

Kope: I know, it's not a classy place to get VIP action. But he was a great customer, no noise complaints, no lot lizards brought back. He'd go to the mall and buy toys from the discount place out there, always talked about how he was going to give stuff to the kids over Christmas. I thought he liked doing secret Santa shit, like, charity.

C: Uh huh. Can you tell us about his last check-in?

Kope: It was really normal, honestly. I saw him back his semi into the lot, his cab's really recognizable and all, with that cartoon painted on it. - _pause_ \- Is it true that brown van that got seen taking the kids was hiding in the trailer sometimes?

Bianchi: We can't comment on that, sir.

Kope: That's why I think nobody saw it 'round the neighborhood. The lot out back's real quiet, once you back in you're minding your own business, and he had a real big trailer so…

Bianchi: Sir.

Kope: Anyway, he came in pretty early that night, almost ran into someone I had waiting. He'd already checked in, the other guy, he just had some, like, local question. Like I know anything about the town, I drive in from across the county line. But he was real patient, Johnny. Looked kind of worried. I don't know why, but he kept looking at the TV. You know why?

C: Please continue your statement. Did he do anything unusual, or did you see anything unusual?

Kope: No, man. Nothing. That's what's so creepy about this, you know? I got a little sister. I told the guy that once. What if that made her a target to him, what if he was gonna look me up on Facebook and drive over, man? Man. Can we finish soon? I suddenly feel real sick. I pulled his usual key off the wall, which was easy cuz the other guy kept looking at the keys - we're that old, still nothing electric, you know? And I kept looking at them, too, so I got him squared away fast.

C: The other guy was another guest at the hotel?

Kope: Yeah, he was a real weird piece of work. I guess he was just trying to go cheap on the business expenses or something.

C: …The other guest was the weird one.

Kope: Don't look at me like that, man. You didn't see the guy.

C: Okay, Kope. Now, we're just going to go through some basic questions before we let you go, and…

. . .

INTERNAL COPY - Informal prep, to be finalized later (V1, of 4)

Transcript of victim statement.

 _Notes_ : Owing to the youth and stress of the victim, following transcripts are obtained by allowing the victim to talk mostly uninterrupted about her experience. All names have been redacted in this prelim text (—1—2, —3, —4), except for references to the suspected actor, Jonathan Ham Wakerobin. The victim (age 7) is unnamed in this document and will be referred to as V1, —1 in text. Both parents are present, as is FBI Agent A. Bianchi, Detective Canton, and Danielle Wizerscki, an advocate from the county family court)

V1: Me and —2 were walking back to the car, my mom had given us a little money and there was a bunch of candy on sale, and she said it was okay if we bought a bag to share later while she did groceries, but do it quick and go straight back to the car. She gave me a key for that. And we saw the van, the ugly van, and there was a boy in the passenger's seat and he looked scared. The window was up, but he looked really scared. And the man, the man ( _unintelligible_ ). He was big but he looked friendly, and he said his son was afraid because the puppy got out of the van when they parked. They were going to buy candy, too, he said, and he pointed at my bag.

V1: And —2 and I looked at each other and we talked real quick and we told him we had to get back to our car or my Mom would be mad. And he said he understood, but he didn't want to leave his son. If we could just take a quick peek over the railing to see if his puppy had gotten under it, down into the ditch by the side of the road there, that would be enough to help him. The boy tried to bang on the window, and the man said please, he's really scared about our puppy. And he sounded so nice, about it! So we went wide around him, and we didn't go near the van, we tried to be safe, and we peeked, and there was no puppy. I was going to tell him, but something, something slammed into me…

/Pause in transcript for V1 to take a ten minute break/

V1: I woke up with —2 and the boy from the van, and there was someone else, and we were all in a dark, crappy little room, and I woke up yelling. The boy covered my mouth, and he told me right away yelling makes Johnny scared. He said his name was —3. I think we all knew it wasn't like a real room right away, all of us when we got there. I didn't know it was a motel at first, though, until I heard horns and —3 told me. He didn't like to talk, but he would, all quiet. He smelled a lot, but I think it was because he was really scared, and he was younger than me. The other girl never talked at all. He said her name was —4. Just me and —2 and —3 talked.

V1: Johnny came in after a while, I don't know how long it was. We never saw a clock. The curtains stayed closed. No one did cleaning for us, Johnny did it, and he untied us and we helped, and he'd give us candy for chores. It was a sucky hotel. I kept wishing someone would knock on the door and help us. Anyone. —2 and I knew a couple different ways to say help. Ayuda, and ting, although I think that doesn't mean help, and hilfe. My mom wanted us to be safe. She watched the news all the time and I didn't want her to be scared. I felt so bad. It was my fault, even though we didn't go near him or that van. Mommy, are you crying? Mom, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm-

/Pause in transcript. One hour break./

V1: The first time he came in, he had my candy, and he had some more candy he bought, and he had a big bag of toys. I could see them through the bag. He wanted to play, he said, and he kept smiling because he said he didn't want to scare us. He just wanted to play, like he never got to play when he was a kid, and he told us all his favorite cartoons. —3 told us later, after he went away, that there had been another boy there when he got there, and the girl, —4 was already there. And sometimes Johnny got mad when he played, yelling something, he didn't know why. He was just really mad, and he'd talk about how bad he felt breaking his toys, and how he was sorry, and how he'd always cry after he did.

—3 told me that's what happened to the other boy he'd seen. And he thought that's what happened to other kids. Johnny broke his toys. I could smell the bathroom after it was warm from the shower that night and it wasn't a pee smell, it was really gross and coppery. —3 was smelly and he was scared but he was also trying to be really brave, and I felt better when it was just us four again. Can I see him soon?

Bianchi: When his parents say it's okay.

V1: I really want to see him. I want to give him a hug. I think he needs one.

Bianchi: I know. I do too.

V1: You're nice. Thank you. Do I need to tell you everything right now?

Bianchi: You can talk until you don't want to. We really need you to tell us everything you can, but it doesn't have to be all today, or even right now. You can take a break whenever you want. You're helping us, sweetie, we gotta do what you need.

V1: Okay. Can I tell you about how we got out, and then take a break? I don't like talking about this, because it sucks and I get scared talking, and I think I need to cry again a lot, but I want to talk about how we got out, because that part's good and it might help me feel better.

Bianchi: Of course you can. We might have to go over some stuff later to make sure you remember things alright, but you tell this how you want to.

V1: Okay. We got really lucky, I think. —2 and I, we were only there for a couple of days. —3 didn't know any more, and —4… I think she gave up. I don't know what she saw. She wouldn't clean the bathroom anymore, —3 said. Johnny didn't get mad at her, he just got sad. But —3 still got scared she would get broken next. He told me that. That's the only thing he called it. Broken, and not coming back. I don't think —4 was scared anymore. She was older, than me but her face had gone all smooth. Is that normal?

Bianchi: It's called shock, —1. It's something our body does when we're very stressed. She's going to be okay. It's going to take her some time, but she's going to be okay.

V1: Oh. I hope so. I want to hug her, too, and tell her it's okay now, we're all out, and she's okay. Someone's doing that for her, right?

Bianchi: Yes.

V1: Good.

Bianchi: How did you get out, sweetie? What happened?

V1: I don't know what time it was. He fed us twice. I got chicken nuggets, they didn't taste very good but I think it was because my tummy hurt. It hurt a lot while we were there. —2 kept wanting her mommy and I wanted mine, too, but we didn't tell Johnny that, because —3 said that would make him sad and he'd want to play, and if he played too much that's when toys got broken. But he went away! He went out, he said he had to do some work, because that's how he paid for candy, and he locked the door.

V1: —3 told us not to get too noisy, because sometimes when he left it was actually a game of hide and seek, and if we yelled, he'd come back, and he'd be sad with us for trying to lose the game. So it wasn't safe to yell. We listened for people, like a maid, but never heard anyone. But later on, later, when it was about to be over, the door opened! And it wasn't Johnny.

Bianchi: Who was it, —1?

V1: —2 said he was a vampire. I don't know. Maybe. He was really tall, and pale, and he looked angry. He wore a lot of black, too, so maybe he was a vampire. He looked past us, towards the bathroom, and his face got really scrunchy and he looked madder. But then he looked right at us and he tried to look nice. I wasn't scared of him. But he didn't move or say anything. I didn't know why. But —3 was right. Johnny wasn't gone yet, and now he had to be really, really angry with everyone.

V1: He came up behind the man, and Johnny had a piece of metal, and he hit the guy! Right along his back! And the vampire man didn't move at all, the metal bended around him and he just looked even madder yet! Johnny was panting and yelling, and the man, he turned around, and he grabbed Johnny's hand with the metal, and he squeezed it while Johnny yelled, and then we didn't see them anymore. The man pushed Johnny away from the door. But we didn't move, because we still had those things on our ankles so we couldn't run, and —3 was panting, like Johnny was going to come back, and be really mad.

V1: But he didn't come back. The vampire man did. And this time he came in, and he got the stuff off our ankles really fast, and he sat us on the couch, and he said help was going to come by. He had to go get it, make sure it was coming. —3 grabbed at him, really, really afraid now, because he thought for sure Johnny was going to come back. Like this was going to be a trick, another game.

V1: The man said 'He is not coming to hurt you ever again,' and 'I promise, I'll be right back,' and he was. It took a few minutes. He sat with us for a little bit, and —4 was all shuddery and he let her sit by him and we didn't talk. We could breathe, though, and —3 was crying so much I thought he was going to be sick. And then we heard sirens and the man said 'Now I have to go. You're going to be all right.' —3 still didn't want him to go, but he left. But I said thank you to him, and we cried, and he was gone. That's how we got out.

V1: Can I take a break now?

Bianchi: Of course you can.

V1: I'm hungry. Can I have pizza?

V1's mother: Sweetheart, tonight you can have whatever you want.

V1: Can we get the other kids? Can we bring them?

( _Unintelligible_ )

END INITIAL TRANSCRIPT

. . .

 _Personal notes from Det. Canton to county sheriff, not for distribution:_ Although we've got the clerk's statement that says there was at least one other person (weird?) staying at the motel that night, that individual paid cash and has not been seen on any security footage anywhere in the area. We can't even yet verify for sure this person was checked in during the rescue of the four kids currently on site. The motel had no cameras in the main areas, exactly as described by Kope, although we're going to shake down the owner about the pinholes we found in some of the other rooms. We've got a lot to come at him over. I'm not convinced he wasn't aware and covering for Wakerobin in some way.

We're also chasing down who put in the anonymous call to the department, whether or not it's the same guy, who flagged us to the motel. We're also investigating how one person, as per our victim statement, did all that to Wakerobin.

He's alive, and he's going to stand trial, and we've got enough evidence now to tie him to most of the disappearances and murders in the area, but goddamn, _someone_ worked him over before we got there.

I don't know if we're tracking down the samaritan angle to investigate the assault on our perp or to shake this guy's hand.

Shit, maybe the kid's right. Maybe he _was_ a vampire, and that's why we've got no footage of him. Certainly I don't want to say the kids had a mass hallucination of some guy that showed up to help them. Kinda fucked, you'd think they'd picture an angel or something. Kids get strange ideas about monsters, though, too. My youngest, they're in the werewolf fascination stage.

Anyway, Wakerobin will wake up within a week according to the hospital, although it occurs to me that I don't know if he's going to be ruled competent to stand trial. Anyway. If _he_ says he tangled with a vamp, fuck it, we're going to close this case and I'm taking paid leave for a month. Spend some time with my kids.

Vampires. Jesus Christ, everything's gotten so weird.

I'm glad these kids are all right, though. I'm so fucking glad.

 _Addendum from county sheriff:_ We're officially ignoring the vampire shit. You're cleared for leave. You did good, Canton. Go rest.

. . .

Aggie smiled as Pandora finished talking. "SHIELD's own in-house cryptid. That's him, all right."

"Loki has an… interesting manner when it comes to choosing to be helpful." Wong returned to the table, now with a tray loaded with hot teas and and little digestive crackers. The event was going to wind down soon, and everyone currently present was over-sugared. Time to ease stomaches and find some inner peace before the night's finale. "I don't understand the hostility between him and Strange, exactly, but they do both seem to thrive on it. His contentiousness here also fits his behavior. Did you win your argument with him, about the way the tale would be told in the papers?"

Pandora Peters shrugged, cheerfully evasive. "Eh, it worked out."

"Good enough," said Wong, hearing the silent request to leave it alone. "Quite good enough. And a fitting enough segue towards the end of our night's ritual."

"So there really _is_ a ritual going on?" Wanda looked puzzled, leaning across the table towards him. "I've felt nothing."

"Me either," said Aggie.

"We haven't needed to. Your patience, for a little longer."

Pandora lazed back in her chair. "Fine with me, I'm warm and cozy and full of high fructose corn syrup."

. . .

Pandora took a bet on whether or not the door to Loki's room was locked and didn't bother knocking to find out. The man himself was already halfway out of his chair, his expression a cold rictus of anger when she shoved herself inside. She tossed the file back at him - the 'adjacent incident' report. The Wakerobin thing, when Loki was supposed to be _only_ messing with Yorkes.

Oh, they'd gotten him, too, a day later. That had been the easy part. Filed and forgotten. "I'm going to make you a deal. I still will _not_ kill any major part of this story, my man, but I'll personally run some interference on the ground to make sure the reporters stay the fuck away from those kids, long term. They won't talk about you. It'll play off like a turn in the media, respecting the victims enough to stay away at _least_ for a few years. By that point, you'll just be some 'samaritan.' Not described in any recognizable way. I saw the later transcripts, that kid could pick you out of blurry news footage in a hot second. She's got a good memory. If she talks, your face is out there. But. I do this? This'll be enough to mostly shut up Talbot before he really flips."

He was still glowering, the annoyance glinting clearly in his eyes. Didn't surprise her that the kids thought they were seeing Fango the Friendly Vampire.

"That's going to cost me some capital. I'll be a while making it up. In exchange, I get to ask _one_ question, and you get to give me an answer. Personal. Just between us."

Time grinded along to the tune of Loki's gritted teeth. It was a fair deal, and she knew he knew it, but she also already knew he hated being locked into any sort of bargain, even a small one. "What is it? Your question."

"If this story came out the way _I_ think it should, with another agency working behind the scenes and undercover to help rescue a bunch of kids, that would be some great PR. Not just for SHIELD, where I agree with Coulson that this place needs it, but for you. Whether you get your real name out there or not, it's one story where you're not a bastard. You did something right, because someone needed to do the right thing faster than they could. They aren't even bitter out there at County, they're just happy as shit to not have more dead kids. But you don't act like you want _any_ of that." She put her finger up. "Why don't you want your image rehabbed? Shit, the Avengers are about to make that Bucky guy a sticker mascot, and he got his image wrecked _bad_."

Loki sat back down in his chair, heavy and abrupt, and he looked away. For a while, Pandora thought she was about to get roasted on her deal. "Simple. You're correct. I don't want it."

"That, boss man, is a right bullshit answer. Expand it a bit."

More silence. Then, grudgingly, "There are human families, a lot of them, who never saw loved ones again after I attacked Earth. Do I have the right to take from them their anger? Do I have the right, less than a decade from that incident, to come out and say I am no longer their villain, and that I should be praised for some small thing I did since? Countries of this world have lashed at each other far longer, and for lesser cause, than what I did.

"Understand, this isn't a matter of some pure, remorseful guilt on my part. To some extent, those deaths are the result of a war. One that, regardless of my forced allegiances or its purpose, I prosecuted. I was raised to not feel undue guilt about deaths in war, and I have always preferred the casualties of my own cause to be lesser. Yet I know that these wounds hit humans harder than what Asgard would feel, and I am not unsympathetic. Do I have the right to ask those who have felt loss, or those that survived, to look at me and not hate?

"There's riddles here, deep ones. Philosophers on many worlds eat themselves alive with questions about the nature of redemption - is redemption pure if it's sought? Is it tainted by the awareness of your actions, thus, is selflessness actually possible? I don't know. Honestly, it would bore me to consider it overmuch."

Loki leaned back in his seat, hands folding together atop his chest, and he looked calm. "Resultantly, I am not seeking anyone's public adoration, because I think it would be _tacky_ of me to do so."

Pandora stuck her hip against the door. "Does anyone in the galaxy hate you more than you hate yourself?"

He glanced at her, dour and amused and clearly planning to ignore her question. " _Why_ did I hire you, again?"

"Because you collect other assholes like some kids do Pokemon."

Loki stared off, his face twitching. "That's one assessment."

"It's a pretty good one." She curled a finger and jutted the knuckle at the folder. "I'll call my favors in. You're off the hook. And seriously, man, look into therapy."

"Sorry, I didn't hear that, was a buzzing noise by my ear right then. Terribly loud. Shut the door on your way out, I'm finishing a report."

"Fuck you. I want a bonus for yanking a bunch of friends around."

"Fine. The door."

Pandora shut the door.

She did get that bonus.

And the four children rescued from the Sunshine Sunset motel, well, they eventually got pizza together. And plenty of time to try and heal.


	6. Epilogue: Hereditary

6\. Hereditary

. . .

Loki drifted, or more precisely he floated, cradled by an Asgardian chaise lounge made of ancient weirblack wood and tanned black auroch leather that predated anyone in his current living family and which also didn't actually physically _exist_ in the void where magic was keeping him and Doctor Strange anchored, but damned if he was just going to wobble around under his own power while waiting for the human to finish dicking around.

It took virtually no energy to manipulate the void around him, and it wasn't going to interfere with the important meddling and muttering going on, and his job relied, gloriously, for once, on sitting there and being a backseat driver. The fact that they were in a pocket of forced magical existence suspended sort of but not quite in a scrap of _between_ that overlapped over the real Sanctum Sanctorum was pretty standard stuff for him, honestly. The way he had them both anchored in place, well, that was slightly different for Loki.

A few weeks ago, Doctor Strange had reluctantly made formal contact with him, the formality of this exchange underlining that Strange thought it was a matter of actual necessity and if everyone could not bitch each other out for a few minutes while he explained the issue, that would be great. Loki let him try to lay the matter out. It went all right, considering.

. . .

"I found _something_ embedded in the local fabric of our reality."

"The local fabric of reality is like whalesteeth, Strange, it filters shit so people don't look out their window every morning and start screaming. That's what it _does_. You better not be calling me and telling me systems are normal, but you found some lettuce stuck in those metaphorical teeth and it's rather sort of gross-looking."

"Lettuce isn't made up of a metaphorical mass of undulating magical awareness that seems to be observing our local region in a way that makes me feel like it's hovering over the entire Northeastern United States and maybe watching it put on its undies in the morning from its place wedged inside a sliver of the _between_. And I don't know how long it's been there, or if it's self aware or what the hell it actually is or what it's doing. I think it's a construct, and I think it's not even actually that big, and yet in its action it _is_."

"All right, now you have my attention."

"I need to get at it, examine what the hell it actually is, what it's made out of, what spellwork put it there - because it is _strange_ stuff, asshole, _you_ take a look at it and tell me you saw it last week begging for dollars in Sorcerofuckistan or wherever it is you hang out being all high and mighty - and functionally defuse it."

Loki blinked. One of their silent rules of engagement was the more openly they insulted each other, the more honest they were paradoxically being. This was serious. "Show it to me."

Strange expanded their auditory spell-call into a magic mirror Skype, then stepped out of the visual to snap his hand and show a different magical mirror, one that carried the reflection of the thing he'd found lurking in the _between_.

"Um," said Loki, momentarily thrown by the fleshlike, grey shape of the artifact. It seemed to be a massive cellular structure, geometric fragments piecing together around an inner core, but the problem was none of that geometry actually _worked_ , and calling it grey belied the fact that really, it was because his eyes couldn't handle whatever colors were actually shimmering along its impossible surface and told his brain 'it's grey, yeah, we're going with that.'

And yet something about it seemed wholly, entirely artificial. Some nutty bastard _made_ that thing and hooked it into a snippet of reality just beyond Earth's cognition. "Yeah, I've never seen anything like that cadging for pizza money." He hadn't, nothing quite like this. It itched at his mind, though, horribly.

"If I try to yoink it out, it's going to fight me on a psychic level. I bet the Viper I technically don't own anymore on that. So I need you to watch my back, yes, _need_ , no cute linguistic games, and if you've got any nifty safety ideas you can throw at this, please, let me know."

"Anchoring." Loki was thinking fast.

"Cute trick if you can rig external spiritual anchoring when you're flitting into the _between_ , Loki. I've never read of it working. It's an all or nothing deal, and I don't have to tell _you_ that. You've bodyslammed into it the way an Aussie rides the waves."

"Right, but you always have to go in knowing, from bones to soul, how to get yourself back out. So if…" Soul ties, he was thinking about soul ties. But this was a more complicated scenario than most of his theories. "Let me work on this for a couple of hours, it's a thesis I've had kicking around for a long time so it won't take much."

"Oh good, let's have a live fire magical testing exercise while farting around on the edge of nonexistence, those are safe."

Loki put a hand up as Strange filled the view again. "Do you know me to take stupid risks?"

Strange rolled his eyes by way of being slightly apologetic. "No. This thing freaks me out so I'm being extra salty. I'll be here, ring back when you've got something."

. . .

Soul ties. Tricky shit for any sorcerer on his level. If Loki was forced ( _forced_ , mind) to run a brief seminar on the topic, it would go something like this:

"Most sorcerers beyond the boundaries of Earth tend to be a thorny, cautious, inquisitive lot. The knowledge a sorcerer will collect over their career is everything to them. A currency, a lifeline, a way to bribe or to curry alliances, and it can also be their greatest danger. The more a sorcerer knows, the easier it is for them to get into trouble because Merlin Shitsocks two planets over thinks _he_ deserves the right to your knowledge. So you learn to not let Merlin Shitsocks get wind of what you may know. Sorcery, thus, oft comes with an unusually complex political environment and a side-gig in espionage. Paradoxically, this reality makes some of the greatest potentialities of the art of magic into something nigh-unachievable for us, save as theoretically-designed spells stocked up in fading grimoires.

"Because what few sorcerers working on the galactic scale can afford with all their riches and their knowledge is _trust_.

"Sorcerers calling each other friends and going on social calls together means, usually, they are quietly sizing each other up to see which of them is going to have a gruesome accident in an alley, and a plundered library. Oh, woe, Merlin Shitsocks accidentally sneezed during a spell and turned his ribcage inside out, that's terrible, he absolutely would have left me, his only friend, his expanded collection of sex ritual grimoires and also that nifty black scrying mirror that linked live to Mephisto's arsehole.

"Put your hand down, I know it's a shit way to live.

"No, you can't get a refund for the seminar, if I have to suffer, you have to suffer. Where was I? Ah. Soul ties.

"So. We all secretly hate each other up there in the greater universe, and we get more powerful, and we hate and distrust each other more, and then you may get to a point where you need to do something deeply, insanely dangerous, and now you've got no backup. And this is where sorcerers up the ante and do _really_ stupid shit with magic, all or nothing stuff. Someone told me, and I regret having this knowledge in this way, that you humans play dress up as wizards and warriors and play tabletop games, and sometimes these mages will use the last trick in their arsenal: the 'final strike.' Absolute nonsense, I would say. Except I know for a _fact_ that some dumb arseholes have had to resort to it because they started something equally stupid.

"Sometimes fiction stumbles onto the truth.

"Sometimes the only way to fix your tumble into a hostile otherdimension is to use every mote of energy in your body to keep _them_ from getting out and from you being turned into a pair of cozy moccasins for some hell-beast that's far too big for your already coagulating body.

"Now, it'd be great if you had a different option than that, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it be _magnificent_ if you could come up with a radically unusual way to tie yourself safely to your dimension? Oh, but you'd have to trust others. Trust them enough to be a brightly lit flare, a guidepost home, that safe beacon that tells your drifting stupid soul-self that everything will be all right. Well, first of all, you'd have to change the socialization of independent sorcerers throughout the galaxy, probably from birth. Good luck with _that_.

"But now let's say you've personally encountered a couple things that start to change your mind: One, you've now met magical societies that actually work _with_ each other, openly and freely and without any major espionage. Right, they're humans, and you're getting over some terrible, long-ingrained opinions of them, but my Gods, they're actually sort of effective and they built a functioning protective network across the planet, and they're often still arseholes - all right, one of them definitely is and the rest seem pleasant enough - but this thing _works_. That's a fucking stunner, if you're a mage from elsewhere in the galaxy.

"And the other is, suddenly you have friends of your own. They're not mages, which probably helps, because you never got stuck in the mindset of seeing them as knowledge-predators. And gradually, you start feeling dimly affectionate about the ones that come later that _are_ mages, to the point where you would particularly trust the ones that look up to you, because they're earnest and curious and willing to learn and you dimly remember that your younger centuries were like that, where you weren't assuming everyone was out to get you.

"Now, that magical society has never fussed with extra-dimensional anchoring because, by and large, they've never been stupid enough to go that deeply into the other-realms. They favor the sundering, flitting through reality-shards, but always and spiritually anchored close to home. They think all this is deep, dangerous stuff because it's higher level work and because they have legends of stupid, feckless bastards like yourselves getting torn up out there, or worse, lost in the formless void of _between_.

"And _you've_ never considered it, because it relies on _trust_.

"But, if you're in a pinch, and you can't quite yet bring yourself to walk up to a bunch of these new friends and say 'look, we're in some real shit here, sit in this room and relax while I anchor myself to your soul, I've left some magazines and it won't even itch,' here's a variant of that idea, one with a bit more subtle rubbed on it:

"Put a handful of these Earthly sorcerers in a room, ones you're already friendly with and thus, quietly, despite every screaming neuron in your brain, would trust. Ask them to have a nice night together, one in which they might better their own bonds of friendship - and thus maybe not ever turn into as much a distrustful bastard as yourself - and have a lovely little party on the eve of one of the more amusing human festivals. Then, use them and the loci of the Sanctum, as your soul-tie, dropping a perfect anchor anywhere in reality or unreality, so that you or an associate could do something heart-stoppingly stupid without destroying yourself. Like defusing an organic mage-bomb _thing_ stuck in the _between_ by an unknown and probably hostile arsehole galactic sorcerer.

"Any questions?

"No, I don't validate parking. Get out."

. . .

The plan worked perfectly, especially since Wong, who Loki had long since decided was the real brains of the operation here, seemed to silently latch onto what they were up to and got it underway without giving Loki crap about his trust issues. Worth it right there.

He could sense them, on the other side of the tissue paper slivers that kept him away from that home reality. Still talking, an aetheric sense of warmth and comfort filling the halls of the Sanctum. He didn't know the stories that were being told, but he expected he was probably a focus of some gossip, and that didn't trouble him in the least.

It reminded him, though. "Not to distract you, but you wanted to leave out _dental floss_?"

He watched Strange's shoulders tense, but the weave of his spell didn't waver. "I already lost that fight with Wong, why bring it back up?"

"Because I want you to know that if you'd gone through with your plans for a healthy Halloween, _I_ would have left those kids magick'd canisters of silly string, a truck full of eggs that'd been left on the Jersey docks for two months, and a singing holiday card giving them my very best regards."

"You sure you didn't anyway?"

Loki, who knew for a fact where one such truck was parked and had been waffling back and forth on the idea for the last week, said without hesitation, "Of course not."

"Right."

"How's all that going? I'm running out of fingernails to pick at." He could tell, mostly. The current manifestation of the thing infesting the _between_ was metaphorically the size of a smallish moon. For Strange to get it under control and then excise it entirely, it had to be fought down to roughly dodgeball proportions, symbolizing its weakness.

It had shrunk maybe a few feet in diameter since Strange had begun his work.

That said, when control of the situation finally shifted, it would probably happen fairly fast. They both hoped, anyway.

"I hate this thing, I hate who made it, and I feel like it's watching me and thinking something dirty."

"Are you channeling all that into the spell?" "Nonzero chance it backfires and empowers the fucking thing."

"Fair, but try taking a second to pause and meditate your loathing of it into concentrated will." He _felt_ Strange's psychic stare, a glower that sped through space-time and drilled, somehow, into the back of his head. Ah, magic. He really did love the art. "I'm not just being an arse, it's a good technique. I've used it a lot."

"You, with a lot of repressed anger funneled into your magic? I. Never. Guessed."

"Sarcasm can be used to similar effect," Loki added helpfully. He also stuck his middle finger up at Strange, knowing that psychic glare caught it.

Strange muttered something that was absolutely not a reading from a sacred text, but he did back off a step to begin a new meditation phase.

After a few seconds, the thing shrank another couple of meters.

"You are _really_ quite annoyed at it," said Loki, impressed. "Pretend it's a relative you don't care for."

" _Stop backseat driving_."

The thing shrank more.

"I will _not_. I'm helping. That hated relative. At Thanksgiving. Shitting on your turkey techniques."

Strange made an uncomplimentary noise. The thing shrank further yet.

"Talking politics at you."

It was suddenly the size of a broken planetoid. Actual progress was happening.

Loki arched an eyebrow, bemused by the sudden shift. "We're not Jedi, Strange. Feeling a bit out of sorts and using all that pissiness to fix and center ourselves in an act of spite doesn't mean we instantly get all wrinkly and overthrow peaceful galaxies. Learning to not merely control your inner turmoil but sometimes use it, it's critical to certain types of magic. It's the other side of your people's meditation, sometimes you can't calmly throw everything out and place yourself in the nothing to start fresh. Sometimes you've got to sit down in the middle of the mess and make something of it. The metaphysical raft, forged of everything you've been suffering. It's not always optimal, Strange, but it's a good way to survive."

"Because you're a paragon of calmness in either situation."

"I _am_ when I'm ass-deep in a complicated ritual. Don't yell at me when you know I'm right, yell at that fucking ugly-arsed thing." He didn't like looking at it, honestly. Loki had grown an aversion to anything vaguely eldritch, probably even a full-on phobia. It never ended well for him, these things.

"I'm not doubting you when you say you haven't, but have you ever seen anything even _vaguely_ like this?"

Loki said, "No," and he said it with the same conviction as before, but that itch kicked off again in the back of his head. "Definitely no, but something about it… upsets me," he finally admitted.

"A familiarity?" Strange didn't sound angry. He understood the complications inherent in IDing strange magics.

"I don't know. A hunch." If Strange successfully tore it down, he might see its creation signatures. _That_ might give him a clue. "We'll see."

"I also see we're getting somewhere finally."

"Think of it as your teacher that took away your favorite book because it was time for other lessons."

"That sounds oddly personal, Loki." It came through gritted teeth.

"I will neither confirm or deny." But, based on the reaction, at least there was one thing the two of them apparently had in common now.

The thing was still shrinking at a renewed pace.

. . .

Wong lifted his head, sensing the change in the air. "Ah," he said, putting his hands together and looking pleased. "We're getting somewhere."

"You look like we just started a seance." Pandora cocked her head and looked at him.

"If by which you mean a ritual where we pull lost souls to us, you're not all that wrong." Wong got up from the table, and with a flick of his hand the bowls of treats and cups of tea scattered into the air around him. "If all of you could rise and help me move this table - it's heavy and enchanted, took me and Stephen an hour to do ourselves. With the four of us, we can move it in minutes."

Aggie shrugged and got up, her feet automatically entering the stance of someone prepared to shove, if mentally, in this case. "Where to?"

"We're just going to lift it into the side room over there by the stairs, preferably without hitting the carpet." He waited until everyone was on their feet. "Now, if you all will please work with me. Focus on me, follow my movements, and use your will to push this heavy sucker. It's going to grumble at you a bit, it liked being out."

"This place specializes in semi-sentient artifacts," said Wanda, realizing.

"Correct, and this one likes company and never gets out enough for its comfort. I expect I'll pull it out again for a holiday supper. And don't worry, I also intend to do some reorganization soon, give it a regular place out in the main rooms." Wong grinned. "You've all made it terribly happy today, though. Now. On my count…"

. . .

The thing in the _between_ was down to the size of one of those wankish gym balls yoga-suited hipsters flung their bodies around on, which was not the nicest way Loki could have described it, but there it was. Strange had started yelling openly at it, feeding himself with a list of lifetime grievances that had become probably one of the most cathartic experiences of his life. Loki was taking great joy in this, because first of all, he'd rarely been anywhere near another sorcerer beyond the boundaries of the Nine without thinking about a laundry list of ways to kill them, and second, he'd taught this uppity arsehole something new and Strange, instead of fighting about it, was taking to it like a gosling to water.

Loki _liked_ teaching, it turned out. But he would also rather die than admit it, of course.

Almost there… Loki got up from the imagined chaise, ignoring its disappearance as he began to fixate himself on the underpinning structure of the thing. Soon it would be deconstructed. Soon, he would get his clues, and they would be pulled safely out of the _between_ before any collateral damage was done to them.

Strange inhaled, ready to deliver the killshot. "And furthermore, I don't even _like Jimmy Kimmel that much_!" It came out in an oddly oversized roar.

The thing shrank to the size of a softball. Strange's hands folded around it as he shouted a Vishanti Word of Power, and he snapped it apart like Gods clapping the first moment of existence into being, while also marking its end.

Loki watched, not blinking, seeing the lines and runes and unearthly, nigh unrecognizable magical language flicker along the broken thing's surface, and as the _between_ faded from around the two of them, the anchor pulling them to safety, he thought, _oh, well, shit, there's Miss Peters' answer, there are absolutely people out there that hate me more than I do myself, oh shit, oh dear, I hope I'm reading this wrong_ -

And then there was light.

. . .

Doctor Stephen Strange, worn out and cast off balance by his victory, plopped flat onto the carpeted floor of the Sanctum Sanctorum like a dying carp, the visual of this being terribly accurate, right down to the bit where he was drenched in a flop-sweat, the Cloak peeling away from him to presumably hie off and find a magical dry-cleaner somewhere the hell else.

Loki landed gracefully on his own two feet, dusting his hands off with sardonic grace, and with his face not showing a hint of his last second realization. He looked around at the small party, who looked back at him without a lot in the way of surprise and with a fair amount of 'it figures' and he spotted the dwindled pile of krispie treats with mugs of hot tea hovering nearby. "Ooo," he said, also aware Wong was the better cook in this place, and he went for a munchie.

"Fuck," muttered Strange from the floor.

"Did you want something, Strange?" said Loki over his shoulder, unwrapping a treat containing a prodigious amount of M&Ms.

"Your skin on a hook."

Loki looked at Wong. "He doesn't mean it, he's really just terribly tired and irritable."

"I know," said Wong. "How did it go?"

"It's done. It's gone." Strange sat up and looked around the room, managing to sound polite and genuinely thankful under the exhaustion. "Thank you all for your assistance."

"What the hell did we do?" asked Aggie.

"You were the anchors for a magical experiment that worked perfectly," said Loki. "I expect I'll offer a briefing on it in the next few months, once I do the after-report on the spell structure. And in so doing, you were all passively a key in removing a hostile force embedded in the local fabric of reality, one that was doing… _something_ , in the region. I think Strange was right, it was an observation device. Very likely in someone's service. To what end, I'm not sure."

The few lies at the end came out smooth as butter, because the last thing Loki wanted on one of the few human holidays he liked was a panic. It absolutely _was_ an observation device, it was wide-range so any particular focus didn't feel singled out, and he clearly read the signature on the fucking thing while his stomach dropped to shit as he realized what - or _who_ , to be specific - the actual focus of the thing probably was.

He hoped he was wrong, he still did. It was possible that in his immediate fluster of concern that he hallucinated the worst possible scenario and the thing had been created by some other random arsehole and it just _happened_ to get stuck in their neighborhood.

But probably not.

Loki smiled and gestured at the room with the treat in his hand, a room of people he knew he could trust to some extent, who were mages, who were all people he knew only because those he now called friends had trusted him and given him a chance, and for once, he lied short term to protect all of them long term, until he figured out how he was going to work with them to stop what was undoubtedly going to be a horrifically large problem.

Mostly for him, because that's what life was to him, a bastard all its own, but he wanted no collateral damage among those he cared for. Not for this, not for past mistakes or future's chance. Not from _them_.

"So," he said, none of this on his face and his posture at ease. "How'd the poker game turn out?"

. . .

Proxima Midnight watched, perched silently in her chair with her painted chin resting in her hand, and her eyes glinted white hot from amidst the free mess of her black hair tangling against her horns. She did not wear her battle armor in chambers with her fellow general - her brother in one sense, her ally in another, and a perpetually living but fond annoyance in most of these - but she carried a sense of impenetrability with her at all times. Including upon her face.

She watched the Maw, muttering to himself in ways that carried no emotion, and knew he would never admit aloud the failure in his spellcraft that had clearly happened. She was not a sorcerer and cared little for the art, but she respected, if coldly, the delicacy and power of it. Thanos had a fine eye for weapons. She had been one, Maw another, her mate and brother and the others as well, and she had full respect and faith in her lord's choices. The children that had stayed his Children, well.

She had plenty of opinions about _them_.

There had been a ceremony for each of the generals, marking the line crossed that meant they were no longer those 'children' but weapons in their own right, great powers of their own claimed at Thanos's whim but now free to roam and maraud, a symbolic death reborn into their grim new lives. A baptism of dark power. It was the greatest moment of her existence, her marriage to Glaive a distant second, and she treasured the memory of other such ceremonies.

Ebony Maw's ascension had been… remarkable. But for the sorcery, he seemed to have little power of his own. A weak and mewling sort of creature, from a world built upon the minds of these thoughtful little maggots. But he had slain his people himself to prove his place in Sanctuary, through manipulation and magic, and she liked him quite well enough after that.

So she chose her words delicately for his sake, for that respect, knowing he would always repay it in kind. Maw had sharp words and little regard for most, but he respected her back in a dignified way she liked. "There has been interference."

"There _has_." The Maw sniffed, delicate and thoughtful. "It's astonishing. I thought the local protectorate had all the effective magical skills of a Sakaraan card counter. Which is to say, a _laughable_ amount. Nonetheless, by some power, my device has been torn out of the _between_. I've gone blind on Earth, not that there had been much to look at."

He looked at her, his face serene but his thin lips turned in disapproval. "Boring little creatures. I quite wish we'd had the chance to scourge it."

"Might yet, my good friend." Proxima didn't move, but her fingers stroked her own cheek, thinking. "Did the traitor sense your mark of making?"

"Doubtful. He would have had to have been present at the unmaking, and no such sorcerer as he would be caught dead working with another that closely. Even these witless things." He sniffed again, mocking. "He's grown soft on Earth, this I've watched, but we know full well Glaive's findings on him. A good torturer, your mate. For all his flaws, I miss him still. The insecurity and childishness the traitor carried, the rage, it would be _remarkable_ if the rat changed so truly as to armor himself against his own such core essence."

Proxima didn't blink. Maw's dismissive regard for anything he deemed lesser than him - which was much of the universe - was also one of his own deep flaws. It was often up to her to cover for it. "But not impossible."

Maw glanced away, unmoved. "Few things are. But I commit to the unlikeliness of it. I don't know what he plays at on Earth. Some salve for his wounds, a beast sleeping safe among the lesser animals. He thinks of us and his crimes against our liege-father seldom, I expect. They've watched for us in that region and seen nothing. It's been long enough to think all of this is past."

"Nova Corp." Now the sneer entered her voice. "They think we gone at last, that we've fled away with the loss of our lord and gone to be petty thieves at the edge of all." She leaned forward, towards Maw, fixing him with her stare, to encourage him anew after his small failure. Such a wound would fester, unless she soothed him. It was a duty she accepted easily. "For their crimes against the House of Thanos, we _will_ return, Maw, we _will_ scourge them, for the life of my mate-"

She hadn't liked Corvus all that much, to be honest, but certain principles mattered to her. And, at least, he'd been a good battle partner.

"And we _will_ reclaim not only the traitor Loki, but our lord, our father, our God of that new, blackened universe he intended to build. Ebony Maw, our Order is alive, our resources are renewed, and we are ready. Blinded or not, we are _coming_ to take back our universe."

She smiled and reached out a hand to her brother and her ally, waiting for him to take it, nodding at the way his flesh felt cold and dry against the stoniness of her palm. "It's just a matter of time, my friend."

Maw gave her one of his rare and treasured smiles, a horrible, wormlike thing that contorted his face unnaturally. Men screamed at that smile, just before the troops cut them down. She loved it in her way, for that very reason, and smiled back as he spoke. "We will, my sister and ally. I stand with you, our General above generals. Lead us home, Proxima Midnight. Lead us home, because oh, how I _do_ miss those tortured cries."

 _~Fin_

 _"I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men." ~ Lovecraft, The Outsider_

 _. . ._

 _Notes:_

Thanks for putting up with a lot of the themes and offshoot characters in this one. There's a lot of spiritual weight in using a holiday like Halloween to kind of wrap up and move past things going on with you, and apparently - this hadn't been my active intent - I had a _lot_ of social shit to get out of my system. A few tidbits -

The structure of this fic was mostly established back in early September, with bits and bobs of it considered earlier, so please, imagine my bemusement and annoyance when Venom landed in early Oct and Sony promptly yelled 'HEY SO WE'RE GONNA DO A MORBIUS MOVIE' and I'm over here staring at my outline like 'jesus, so, it's happened yet again.'

The real Morbius was never intended to fully show up in the first story, but hey, we shanked a Nazi shithead using his name and then promptly gave Wanda her Jewish heritage back in the next chapter. I'm good with that.

A Nazi shot up a synagogue in my city maybe a day or two after I finished her chapter, I want to mention. Her chapter is small, and has a lot to say, if quietly, about being a woman or anyone with something they feel they need to hide because of the hate they might get from others, and I'm glad I wrote it, and I love all of you, especially if you've felt you've needed to hide your faith or your sexuality or your status as a survivor to feel safe. I'm so sorry the world is like this. I'm trying to be here for you.

I know 2/3rds of this fic isn't the usual stuff people show up to the Codex for, with side characters taking the spotlight, but again, I needed it. I hope some of it meant something to you.

Wong's chapter became a difficult one. 90% of the beats I needed for his story were set before I sat down to write it - the tulpa, the ties to the Ten Rings and the Mandarin (in a way hopefully less horrifically racist and controversial than the original, and less awkward than what they tried in the Iron Man films), and this chapter is also why there's a random Wong one shot just previous. But I hadn't figured out where in China Wong chased the tulpa to, and I picked Karamay based on proximity to the Gobi desert regions.

And that's when I realized it all overlapped with what's actually happening out there. The camps Wong talks about are real. The pressure from China on Tibet is real. Forced re-education and murder is happening in China, particularly focused on the Uyghur Muslims in that region. Chen Quangho, unnamed in the fic, is a real person, a Party loyalist who was responsible for the repression and intense police scrutiny during his time as Secretary of Tibet, and for his work there, they gave him the Xinjiang region, where he puts people, Tibetian and Uyghur and Kazakhs, in camps. To prevent terrorism, by terrorizing people.

So, yes. I have a lot on my mind. No, I don't think you need to make yourself sick collating all the evils in the world. It's something I struggle with, and I try to not overload my work with it, but sometimes, despite myself, it forces its way in.

The next fics will carry lighter tones. We're here for a good time. I'm reminding myself of that. Self-care is important, too. Sorry we got heavy.

Oh, and then the final story has a child serial killer. At least that one was lighter? In its way? Um…

On to the fun bit, the epilogue chapter reveals what all this was about, and introduces some important elements to the future arc I have in mind, and the reason I started a new Codex folder and probably confused some followers.

Let's take a step back to the end of the original Codex, and the ending of 'When the Man Comes Around.' In it, Coulson and Loki discuss a number of lingering threads and possible plot hooks kicking around in my head, including Strange worried about certain imbalances created by the Soul Stone and a rumor that Thanos's generals, such as Proxima Midnight, were things to keep an eye on.

That fic finished posting online in April 2016, and I referenced the Order because they were fairly new creations (introduced to the comics after the first Avengers film, with Corvus Glaive specifically seeming to be inspired by The Other) and nifty and could be something fun to use in a future story. The Infinity War film was a known quantity by then, but not what it would entail. It would be a big movie, sure, but were they really going to fill it to the brim with up to five new villains?

 _Well_.

The Black Order was officially announced for Infinity War about a year later. If you check NASA's recordings of ambient sound ricocheting around Earth's atmosphere at that time, you just might hear me screaming 'JESUS SO IT'S HAPPENED AGAIN.' Because that's what writing the Codex is for me. A series of bizarre near-prophecies and never any winning lottery numbers.

Anyway, so, that tanked the idea I had for a follow-up arc after the original Codex. I farted around with a series of small stories instead in the 'Verse, mostly because I couldn't give the characters up. Still can't seem to, actually.

And then, sometime this year, I thought 'well, what if I un-tank it? The hell with my mental need to follow continuity, Agents of SHIELD is already unanchored.'

And here the shit we are.

Wish me luck. I don't know when we'll be back, because I'm dedicated to keeping a slower pace and trying to get some other work in, but I expect we will be diving back into a galaxy of deep trouble before too long.

Happy holidays out there. Try to be good to each other. Except Nazis. Fuck Nazis.

Nov 2018.


End file.
